


Sanguine Eyes

by pensword



Category: Forgotten Realms, Legend of Drizzt
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Injuries, Canon-Typical Violence, Character of Faith, Divine Magic, Drow being drow (many warnings may apply), Dungeon Crawl, F/M, Kelemvorite, Language Barrier, Like really the absolute slowest of slow burns, Neverwinter Nights (mention), Slow Burn, Swearing (so much swearing), Swords & Sorcery, Undead
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:01:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 50,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22723609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pensword/pseuds/pensword
Summary: Sanguine: Optimistic, or, Blood-red.It was meant as a simple act of compassion: encouraging a bitter spirit to move on from memories of a dark life and a shameful death, and so be freed from the demi-plane that held him trapped.Exactly how he does that seems to be up for debate.Iswen, paladin of Kelemvor, accidentally brings Zaknafein Do’Urden back from the dead (about a century ahead of schedule for those following along at home). However he got here, wherever "here" is, he is determined to take the second chance she’s offered and carve out a better life for himself, even if that means living on the surface.Especially if it means forming an unexpected and unlikely partnership with the paladin who freed him. But, really, she throws herself into more fights than he does, and someone needs to watch her back: if it’s him, he can repay his debt to her and be done with her.He always was good at lying to himself.(Updates monthly)
Relationships: Zaknafein Do'Urden/Original Female Character
Comments: 187
Kudos: 78





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's worth noting that I update about at the speed of glacial drift. But this story has been in my head long enough I can't abandon it, no matter how long it takes to write a chapter.

**1369 DR, Year of the Gauntlet**

**13 Marpenoth**

Dawn was just cresting over the graveyard as Iswen sang the Liturgy of Peace for no one except the dead. Most of them were beyond knowing the requiem was being said for them, but the words needed to be sung regardless; if nothing else, she needed the practice. Two years was enough time to memorize the words, the melody, even when the song had been newly penned with archaic words.

It was not enough time to become accustomed to staring down at the fresh grave, a hillock of dirt in the tawny brown grass of autumn, and feel a twisting pull on her heart as if she’d buried her own father - something she was never sure was entirely her own, or another gift from the Lord of the Dead.

He’d been someone’s son, though; she’d always known that part, even when she’d been a child rambling around old graveyards on the caravan roads, reading names on stones and wondering who they’d really been, the life that they’d lived that was so much more than the letters carved into a headstone.

There hadn’t been anything she could do for those old graves, just as this seemed such a small thing to do for this new one, and her voice nearly broke around the final ascending bars. How could ritual, mere words, help the departed spirit find their proper afterlife or protect the empty shell left behind from being ravaged by natural or unnatural means?

And if she, one of Kelemvor’s rare paladins, didn’t have the answers, what good was she to the living who needed the answers still more than the dead?

No mourners at this one, at least. She held the last note, reaching out with her voice and with the intent for what moved beyond the spirit, and then even the last note faded away; Iswen took a moment, gazing out over the tight cluster of headstones ringed by a low wall, the hills of the rich farmland rolling up around them, sprawled out from the double-square of the village. The trees were as amber as the grass, leaves brushed with orange and yellows and a streak or two of red. They rustled in the breeze, and she shivered at the nip to it. Autumn might have a few warm days left for them, but winter was rushing towards them on a few more of these chill winds.

Goodman Holgar had ended up right; he’d said he’d rather die than live through another Northern winter. It seemed somehow fitting for the irascible farmer that when she’d gone to check on him yesterday morning, the part of him that mattered had been gone. He’d been alone in the world, and so she’d been the one to lay the diminished body - bones and skin but heavy for what it lacked - in its grave, and now stand over it.

Two years a paladin of Kelemvor, and she’d never done a burial, not like this. It was hard to tell what the god demanded, when the god himself had only manifested out of the bones of Myrkul two years ago; she more than anyone knew that there was far more work to do cleaning up the mess of undead and cursed death artifacts that the two previous gods of death had left in their wake.

But this had to be important too, her heart insisted. They as a priesthood couldn’t simply run after the bad, but had to chase the good. Kelemvor’s purpose was not merely to oppose everything Myrkul had done in his tenure as god of death, but to aid and comfort the dying and grieving. A large task, she always thought, but even more now as she looked on the tangible evidence of that theology. She’d done as Kelemvor called her to do, and she certainly would not forget the once-adventurer with the owlbear skull over his hearth and five different stories for why he had it.

She was just damned if she knew if that - if _she -_ was enough.

“Iswen.”

She turned at the sharp voice, grateful for the distraction right up until she recognized the man striding for her by nothing more than the set of his shoulders and the long, purposeful strides that carried him directly across the green towards the graveyard.

“Shit,” she muttered under her breath, and at least Vigilant Commander Arlen was too far to hear, far enough that she actually had a chance to straighten her shoulders and rub her sweating palms on her muddy black trousers and push down the scowl that he’d ignored her courtesy-rank. Again.

“Commander,” she said when he drew close enough for polite conversation. She inclined her head, but refused to salute even if old instincts itched up and down her arm.

Tall and handsome as a hero, possibly by the grace of Torm, Arlen wasn’t many years older than she was, but showed the same weathered-leather skin and grizzled gray hair that were nearly as much a uniform as battered armor and worn-smooth holy symbols for paladins who’d sworn their vows a decade ago. Like her, the amber tones to his skin were natural as well as tanned, though his eyes were sharp blue while hers….

For twenty-six years, when she looked in a mirror, brown eyes had stared back at her. Now, after accepting Kelemvor’s call, they were gray. It unnerved her more than it should; why should the color of her eyes matter, when her swordarm was strong and few were better on horseback? Or, as Kelemvor’s teaching ran, when the body would fail and die anyways - and for a paladin, usually sooner than most?

It shouldn’t matter, but it did. Just as it shouldn’t matter that his eyes were as keen as his hawk-like nose, piercing through her as if she was one of his Unproven, a novice in unadorned armor. Hers might be Kelemvor’s dark gray and black, but damnit, two years ago she’d had the same sunrise orange tabard that he wore now over armor she knew would be sparkling. She pushed down the wistful tugs of memory of his callused hands smoothing the final polishing cloth as lovingly over his breastplate as he would a lover’s skin.

She knew that too intimately as well, just as she knew that one of his muscled shoulders bore a knotted scar from a crossbow, a devastating wound that had healed well, but still troubled him when the weather turned to winter.

Not that he would show it now, just as he would not show if he had any fleeting memories of his own. “If you are finished with your ritual, there are duties that require your attention,” he said.

“Yes, of course,” she said. What else was there to say? There were always duties for a paladin, Tomtar or Kelemvorite.

He turned on his heel as abruptly as he’d come up to her, and strode away, back towards the squat stone temple that served as home for the paladins in the area. Iswen followed in his wake, staring at the twitch of his cloak over his shoulders. How in the Nine Hells didn’t it trip him up? She wrapped a cloak around herself as much as the next warrior on the road, but she’d spent more time untangling it from around her legs than sweeping it back from her shoulders. She knew it wasn’t a Tormish thing; she hadn’t been able to, even when she’d been one of them at his side.

She was behind him now, trailing after even the hem of his cloak. But when he swept into his office, she forgot all about him. It was a pleasant room, south-facing and so sunny even in early dawn, the dark wood of his heavy desk glowing with the same care as his armor, the stone walls of the temple barely softened by a purple banner with Torm’s metal fist.

She saw none of it, and wouldn’t even if it hadn’t been familiar. “Mistress Belia,” Arlen began as he curved around his desk, but Iswen didn’t wait for introductions. She went directly to the elderly priestess sitting in the chair in front of it the desk, and knelt in front of her. Her short corkscrew curls were soft white against her dark skin; her green robe was faded to moss-shaded with age and washings, and hung loosely on her bowed shoulders, folding over fingers knotted in prayer.

And grief rimmed her, something more than the sorrow in her deep brown eyes when she looked up, more than the worry that dug deeper creases around her mouth and eyes and made her hands unsteady as they unhooked. “Are you…?”

“I am Sir Iswen, paladin of Kelemvor,” she said, her voice soft.

Mistress Belia reached for her hands, and if she had calluses that did not come from a sword, there was no less strength in her grip, something as much presence as physical. “Our lady the Great Mother bless you,” she murmured.

A greenpriest of Chauntea, Iswen filled in, and the titles droned in her ears down from the memory of her childhood tutor: _Great Mother, Grain Goddess, Rose-maker, Farmer’s Friend_ , and more. In a book, they had been dry things, tasting of ink. She’d always found a greater honor to the goddess in the dirt beneath the nails of her faithful and the gentle strength of their hands.

But those who followed a goddess as richly tied to life as the Earthmother did not often seek out the martial arm of any faith, much less Kelemvor. “I was told you have need of me,” she said.

Mistress Belia nodded, closing her eyes and tightening her grip, drawing in strength with a slow breath. “Two of Brookhollow, my village, slipped away three nights ago, and we have not had word of them sense. They were not runaways,” she said, answering the question before it could be asked. “They were to be married in the spring; they merely wished privacy.”

Her voice had gone deep with sorrow, her dark eyes looking away from Iswen and towards the wall, as if she could see through it to the fields she tended. Iswen squeezed her hands, reminding her of where she was. “Where did they go?” she asked softly.

“A ruin, in the forest beyond the fields.” Belia seemed to fall still deeper into herself, small and tired. “When I was a girl, not even an acolyte, the evil men who lived there were driven out, and the walls of the tower torn down. But what they did there cursed the land itself, and not even Chauntea’s blessings could restore it, and so we’ve left it abandoned.”

Boding danger beat against her breastbone, but Iswen nodded, and kept her hands firm and steady on the priestess’s. “Are you sure that’s where they went? It seems there would be easier places for a couple seeking privacy,” she said.

“If you mean the place I think, it does have a palpable sense of malevolence,” Arlen said, reminding Iswen that he was still in the room - that this was his office, even.

Belia sighed. “We had suspected, but I sent my acolyte to be sure. And last night I saw him in my dreams.” It was hard, with her skin tone, but Iswen thought she paled, and her fingers trembled. “He said he was dead, and trapped.”

Iswen nodded. Whether or not the ruin had been where the lovers had gone, it had caused his death, and that demanded investigation. “Did he say anything else?” she asked. “How he was killed, or trapped, or…”

“No,” she said, a rasp in her voice. “Only that he was tormented. He is dead,” she added fiercely. “Isn’t that enough?”

It would have to be, Iswen thought with an inward sigh. Perhaps she knew more, had seen one nugget of information in her dream that would help, but prying it out would leave her bleeding and angry. And, in the end, she’d see soon enough anyways. “Alright,” she said, bracing a hand on her knee as she got to her feet. “Then tell me where this ruin is.”

“Brookhollow is an hour’s ride away, along the Trade Road,” Arlen said. He turned, and his hand hovered over the large scroll cases, carelessly stacked in the corner, until he plucked the correct one from the tumble. He uncapped it, and the curled parchment slithered out, unfurling as he swept it onto his deck, briskly finding knives and mugs to hold the corners.

“Here,” he said, tapping somewhere in the center, and Iswen stood to look down at the detailed map. Her father had a larger one tacked up in his office in his home in Waterdeep, showing the broad sweep of the Sword Coast from Waterdeep down to Calimshan, so many hundreds of miles that only the major trade road and cities were shown. This one was more intimate, showing only the lands around Red Larch, Triboar, and Yartar, but that scale could include each little village and the web of roads and trails between them, and especially the ones that cut through the fringes of Kryptgarden forest.

Brookhollow, Iswen saw, was one of those; midway between Red Larch and Triboar, the village’s roads forked to that southern and northern village, meeting up with the Trade Way to take advantage of the larger, better-traveled roads.

It left their back to the forest, and when she glanced at the greenpriest, she nodded, and gestured to the map. “There is a third trail, running from behind the village, that leads into the forest,” Belia said quietly. “The first mile it is well-kept enough, but after that, we have allowed it to become overgrown; we thought that would keep us all safe, if it was not easy to travel.”

Perhaps it had, for a time. Perhaps it had kept bandits from trying to dwell within the tainted ruins, and certainly animals would have made their own paths anyways. It would mean a hard ride now, though that couldn’t be helped. “If they’ve managed it, a destrier should,” she said as she turned away from the map. “Is there anything else you can tell me?” she asked.

“Only that the evil must have grown stronger over the years, to have slain three,” Mistress Belia said softly.

Or it wasn’t the same evil, and didn’t that bode well for her day. Iswen nodded, and a glance at Arlen showed the same thoughts in his eyes. “Then best I’d go and fight it before it can kill more,” she said, and with that, turned out of the office.

Her mind was full of what she needed to take with her and what she might find; she didn’t realize that Arlen had followed her out until he was at her shoulder, striding down the hallway. Then with a neat pivot, he was in front of her, holding up a hand to stop her in her tracks. “Hold one moment more,” he said.

Drawn up short, Iswen felt the annoyance that was less worthy than the longing sparking around her mouth and eyes; she’d gotten her father’s complexion, the sands of Calimshan, but her mother’s Waterdhavian strong jaw and ferocity. “I am of your command by courtesy and convenience,” she said. “I have been given orders, and mean to fulfil them to the best of my abilities.” Only paladins and Waterdhavian elite could make courtesy an insult.

“There is more to this than Mistress Belia knows,” Arlen said.

The back of her neck prickled, and her own stance shifted, her hand settling on her hip, where her sword usually hung. “What is it you don’t want them to know?”

“There is…” he frowned, and unbent enough to run a hand through his hair, his eyes distant from her, a gesture that made her heart ache. When his dark hair was ruffled like that, he looked as young as she still sometimes felt. “The place that they wish you to go contains more than one evil,” he finally said. “Whatever killed her acolyte, and likely the lovers, may be of the place itself, or only dwell in it. But we know that there is also an artifact that we - the Tormtar,” he corrected, “wish recovered, one that has long been rumored.”

“If you’ve known it’s there, why haven’t you sent Tormtar to retrieve it before?” she asked.

His shoulders squared, and his eyes went cold and hard again. “As you should know,” he said, clipped as if she really was a novice, “the Tormtar do not go where they are not invited, or at least permitted.” His shoulders drooped, for a moment showing her the large heart of compassion she knew he possessed, one only hedged with rules because he knew too well the value of honor, especially when it was hard. “No matter what we wish, we cannot trample others in our haste to do good for them.”

It was perhaps the one thing they could agree on; or, more accurately, that he would think they could agree on. Iswen pushed the cynicism down as another thing unworthy of a paladin, even if she was probably right. “What is this artifact, then?” He hesitated, and her mouth twitched before she could control herself. “If you want me to look for it, a description would be useful.”

“Of course,” he said, the tension around his eyes easing, as if he’d thought she’d meant something else. “It’s a bronze palm-sized orb, crowned with spikes that appear as fangs.”

“And it will have a palpable sense of malevolence, I expect,” Iswen said, already resigned to the inevitable. Unsentient artifacts with fangs were rarely created by paragons of virtue for noble purposes.

Commander Arlen’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t actually smile. He’d always been a better paladin in that regard. “If you do find it, or any other artifacts you judge dangerous, bring it back to us. We’ll contain it until we discover a way to destroy it.”

“And if I don’t, I’ll still have killed whatever has taken up lodgings wherever it is,” Iswen said, and it might be duty, but that made her nearly cheerful. “Presuming I don’t die.”

“Try not to,” Arlen said wryly. “A paladin of your experience is hard to replace.”

It was nearly a joke, one only they would understand as humor. Perhaps they could at least work together, even if she would never be in his confidence again. She told herself it didn’t hurt, or if it did, that it would heal. “And I’ll try to bring back anyone you send with me in one piece,” she said.

There was silence, and her easy humor faded as his eyes hardened, his face closing off as firmly as a shut door. “You are fucking _shitting_ me,” she snapped. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting; not much, of course, but _something_.

“You never could mind your tongue,” Arlen said with equal anger and disgust. “A paladin does not-”

“A paladin doesn’t get sent into a ruin hunting two pieces of evil without allies,” she said. That was a very good way to get killed; she was nearly positive that there had been several lectures given to them both when they were young paladins about why going into danger alone sounded glorious and ended poorly.

“A paladin fights evil,” Arlen countered, all dignity from the cloak sweeping over his shoulders to the top of his shiny boots. “That is often a lonely path.”

“Not when in the middle of a fucking chapter house,” she snapped. “I saw Valdis just last night. She would have told me if she had been —” called by Torm. This was a chapterhouse of Tormtar: she was surrounded by paladins, and specifically Tormtar. She realized why he’d given his answer at the same instant that she met his hard eyes.

“Perhaps not,” he said, terribly cold to chain the fury. “You have no command here anymore. And I have no paladins to spare,” he said, nearly as lofty as the principles he claimed, but with that deep anger that darkened.

Valdis had been her friend, a partner in a dark time. But no, she might not have mentioned a calling to someone outside the Tormtar; Arlen wouldn’t be lying about that. But nor was he telling the entire truth; she didn’t have truthsense as strongly as a Tyrran but she could feel the shadows of part-truths in the corridor around her. Or perhaps that was just knowing all that she did.

There just wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. Not to the commander of the chapter house she was currently attached to.

Iswen’s jaw was too tight to speak - and that was probably for the best, given she wasn’t entirely sure what would come out of her mouth if she did - and so she only nodded, and just once. She stepped around him, and felt his eyes on her back as she lengthened her stride towards the stables.

At least her destrier was on her side. Possibly because Iswen regularly bribed her mare with sugar cubes, but right now, she would take what she could get.


	2. Chapter 2

“Well, shit,” Iswen muttered as Nutmeg planted her hooves and refused to step onto the broken flagstone path. She reached down and gave the chestnut mare a few strokes, and either her gauntlet or the sense of the place in front of them both made Nutmeg snort and shake her dark mane. And not move an inch.

“Yeah, me too girl,” Iswen said with a sigh as she kicked her feet free of the stirrups and dismounted. Clucking her tongue, she lead Nutmeg back down the game trail, away from the ancient ruins scattered in a sunny clearing. She’d hoped to get closer on horseback, but had more than half-expected that she’d need to do this on foot, and not just because the ruins were reputed to sprawl for acres belowground.

She picked a spot that could later serve as her night’s camp, but only unsaddled Nutmeg and left the gear in a pile beneath the shelter of an oak’s branches; the mare knew better than to stray, and being she was a paladin’s destrier, Iswen could even trust that training. Besides, there was nothing here that would bother them, and no point in stalling by setting up a camp she would not need if everything went well and she left the ruins before sunset; experience whispered otherwise, but she held to the hope regardless.

Nutmeg cropping grass behind her, Iswen headed back to the start of the path, loosening her sword in its sheath as she did.

It looked a pretty place: a tumble of stones in a clearing, so overgrown and ancient that it took the eye a minute to see the straight lines and right angles, forms that nature alone would never have made. But once seen that way, it was clearly an abandoned castle, or perhaps a temple, or at least a stone tower - the walls were defined with only a few stones that remained atop each other, softened by time, making it impossible to tell just what it had been.

It looked, Iswen judged as she stepped closer, like a place where the worst that lurked within the tumble-down and overgrown walls would be a den of foxes; a place where village children could safely come on picnics and feel brave exploring the underground halls, but come to no real danger. Birds should be singing in the trees, and bunnies scampering in the old arden, and the push by what had been the front door - an arch and an oak plank, now the tallest point of the tower - should have been sweet-smelling lavender.

But the wild animals knew just as well as Nutmeg did what this place was. No birds flew here, but wasps patrolled the overgrown orchard, guarding the rotted windfall fruit, and the bush by the door was only dead thorns.

And the instant she set foot on the flagstone path, as worn and broken as the walls, more stepping stones than road, Iswen knew why. The cold stole her breath away, as if the sunny day was overshadowed, or another season entirely. The ruined walls couldn’t cast shadows, but the ruins still reared up in front of her, pressed down with a presence that twisted everything around it to brooding malevolence.

“Devil-worshippers,” she said as she touched her sword again for reassurance, starting up the path. “Or Bane or Cyric or Bhaal.” This place was old enough for it to have been the home for a cult to the Lord of Murder, and no matter that two of those were dead, the blood shed on such altars could taint the land beneath them for centuries.

Her hackles prickling and her sinuses tightening as if before a thunderstorm, Iswen walked the quarter mile towards the ruin, her steps slow against the press of what her senses insisted was darkness.

In the end, it didn’t really matter exactly what had caused it; there was something evil inside, and it needed to be killed before more people died.

And the dead needed to be laid to rest. Iswen almost faltered, and wished she could blame it on the evil of the place. Killing evil was what a Tormtar paladin did; Mistress Belia had asked for a Kelemvorite, for her, so that the dead were honored appropriately, right along with the evil being slain and the ruin being cleansed.

Could anyone fault her for forgetting, especially when she had a sword on her belt? Or was it bad enough that she did enough faulting for everyone?

Iswen halted on the threshold of the door, letting out a slow breath, and then set one hand on the twisted iron handle and drew her sword with her other. This was pointless, physically; she could easily have walked around it into the ruins. But opening the door and stepping across the threshold was a statement of spiritual intent, and that was as important a weapon as the sword at her hip.

The ruin didn’t like it. A draft hissed behind her as she stepped down from the stone threshold into the space that had once been the great hall; a harder shiver ran down her spine, a memory of the stone walls, though only a few remained standing now, and more of those that had walked the halls, and left the world quivering in their wake as they crossed the stones.

People thought nothing was left after someone was gone, but Iswen had found that strong emotion in a place left a ghost of itself behind, like the scent of spices left in a coffer after they’d been sold. It was not a true haunting - it was not from a spirit of someone now dead - but it still had all her instincts insisting that she was in danger now.

Well, she admitted ruefully as she stood in the center of what had once been the Great Hall, they probably weren’t _wrong_. Not when she had at least three bodies to find and lay to rest, and destroy whatever it was that lurked here that had killed them. In that order.

What had been the interior of the castle was now only defined by low lines of stones, punctured by a few larger piles, doorways turned into tilted pillars. With her eyes nearly closed, she could almost see the layout of the first floor as it once had been; the lord’s chamber off to the left behind the head of the hall, the rounded watchtower that had defined and guarded one corner, the long servant’s hall off to the right that had held the kitchens, storerooms, and barracks.

“If I were a pair of idiot lovers,” she said as she took a step forward, glancing between one doorway and another, no matter that the entire floor could be seen at a glance, “where would I go?”

The lord’s bedchamber. Tall grass grew where once had been a bed, but the remaining walls gave the place a little more shelter and privacy, even aside from the idea of playing at being lord and lady of the keep. Besides, there still remained a square of bricks that had been the room’s fireplace; cold now, and when she knelt and ran her hand over the center of it, a sniff of the residue that came up onto her gauntlet told her it was dirt that dappled it, not ash.

Still, she took her time bending back the grass with her sword, looking for a depression where bodies had lain, same as a hunter would look for a deer’s bedding grounds. This long afterwards, she wouldn’t be able to track them by footprints, but their movements would tell a story of what had happened here, enough to give her a direction for where their bodies would be - and where their killer had come from.

That they hadn’t been here told her that either they had made their lover’s bower elsewhere, or they hadn’t had time to enjoy themselves before they died. In spite of her lingering resentment towards those who had gotten themselves and an innocent killed, Iswen felt a tug of pity as she moved on to the drum tower. They had not been seeking death and destruction, after all, only a private place - and if the place that they had chosen had been one that would give them a little thrill to explore for the taboo surrounding it, well, their death was too high a price to pay for that transgression.

It was easier to hold to that thought when she stepped onto the flagstone floor of the tower, and saw the two wine glasses tucked in the more-sheltered corner. The stones might be worn smooth, and with grass that had forced their way between the individual flags in place of mortar, but no one could call the floor more comfortable than the grass, only more sheltered in the curve of the walls that were still only half the height of a man.

How could she grudge them for what they had done? Iswen turned from the woeful wine glasses, waiting for two drinkers that would never return, and crossed the grassy expanse again. Would she have done any different, had she not been gifted the senses to feel the lingering aura of this place and the training to understand what it meant, and if she had a lover to entertain?

Forgiveness was always the hardest virtue; even mercy was easier, and the one that rose up in her at the scent and sight of the body of the acolyte lying across the large stone hearth in the center of the kitchen. “Shit,” was the first word out of her mouth - no proper prayer by anyone’s standards, much less Kelemvor’s, but she meant the feeling behind it just as much as the rolling prayer that rose to her lips.

Knowing what she would find never made it easier seeing it, not in ten years of being a paladin.

After this long, the half-elf acolyte was only truly identifiable by the scraps of stained and tattered green robe still wrapped around the body; sprawled facedown on the flat stone, his olive skin was mottled with green and black, split in places as if rent by claws. When she’d first seen a body, Iswen had thought that animals had caused those long tears; she’d learned that they were merely part of the body rotting away, and the cause of the foulness rising up from the bloating body.

“Chauntea embrace your body and bring forth good wheat from your bones,” she murmured as she sheathed her sword, and if the literal interpretation of the prayer was unlikely in this particular place, the sentiment counted.

But even aside from proper prayers and sentiment, she needed what the body could tell her. Iswen covered her nose and mouth to keep from gagging at the fetid smell as she crouched to examine the body closer. It was a physical reaction, she knew, and a natural one she could never get used to, but she knew her duty.

The bloat of the body, the chewed edges of the skin where beetles at least had been at it, even the staining of the stone beneath it where fluids had leaked out: none of it really mattered. She needed to know what had killed him, and then she would put him to rest.

There was something dark running along his skin near his neck, something more than mere corruption. His head was turned away from her, and she caught herself before her fingers brushed back the dark hair from the face. She’d done that with other bodies, and had ended up with a handful of hair and decayed scalp more times than she cared to admit; she liked to think that she could, eventually, learn from her mistakes.

She shifted position, circling around, and stepped up onto the overgrown hearth, and crouched again by his outstretched hand, leaning closer, hardly registering the smell at the sight of the black line running up from his fingertips to his arm, nothing that had naturally happened to the body after death. He had touched something, or something had taken his hand, and she would bet a new-minted silver shard that it had killed him.

Some ghosts could do that, if they were malevolent enough. Iswen sat back on her haunches, sweeping a gaze over the deserted ruin as she thought. So could wraiths; ghouls could, but a ghoul would have eaten the body down to fragments of bone and licked up the blood. “Could even be something alive,” she murmured as she opened the pouch on her belt. That was unlikely, with as little living that could tolerate this cursed place.

“First things,” she breathed out, nearly a prayer itself. Her belt-pouch was larger on the inside than the outside, large enough she had to think to select the correct box, one with a top inlaid with lattice carving over moonstone. She pressed her thumb in the center, and the top slid back on its grooves; she tilted it forward, and with a shake, scattered the salt inside over the body. Reaching up, she fished the iron chain from around her neck, and held it over the body, the round pendant stamped with the skeletal arm and scales of Kelemvor swinging back and forth in lazy arcs. She sealed the ritual with the chanted requiem for peace.

The scent faded first, a nearly physical swirl of smoke as it drew back down to the body, and she could finally take a full breath; for a moment, the air was clean, even in the middle of a ruin such as this one. Gray light, so faint it was little more than a shimmer in the air, rippled over the body, curved around it, and some of the decay seemed to fade, covered over.

The body could be moved now without it falling to pieces, but Iswen murmured, “Be at peace; I shall not leave you here,” even as she stood. Burying the body in a far more suited place was important, but not before she had found the rest and finished her mission here.

He’d fallen here. Iswen stepped back, fixed her holy symbol into the hilt of her sword at her hip, looping the chain around the hilt, as she examined the square remains of the kitchen walls. “He fell on the hearth,” she said. “Not face-up, he didn’t stumble backwards over it. He wasn’t facing what had done this to him. Was it already gone?”

She took a step back from the body, judging distances and directions. Then she took another step, and considered the hearth itself. Worn and weathered down to nearly the same level as the ground, and with the grass growing wild in the floor, difficult even for her to see. “You were touched,” she murmured to the body. “You start walking - maybe even running - back for help. Your foot catches the hearth, and you fall on it. Was it still behind you and drained more of your life? Or were you already dying?” It was hard to say, and possibly a moot point. “And why did you let it touch you to begin with?” Now, that was the real question.

But she had at least one answer. If he’d fallen forward, then she could trace directly backwards, at least initially. But in only a few steps, she looked up, and there was a gap between the ruined walls of the kitchen that had her moving towards it, hand on her sword. She could think of no better place to begin a hunt for a wraith than the storerooms and dungeons beneath the castle. “And if the other bodies aren’t here,” she said, trailing off as she approached the steps that had once been behind a door; the door was gone now, though the gap in the wall remained, and so did the stairs themselves.

Any torches or magical lighting it might have had were long gone. “I hate this part,” she remarked to the yawing black pit. Closing her eyes and drawing in a deep breath, Iswen closed one hand around the hilt of her sword, around the symbol of Kelemvor, and imagining sitting in the middle of a graveyard; the darkness of the night and death surrounded her, but it was a soft darkness, full of gentle comfort even if the sadness of the inevitable lingered. That inevitability, that natural turn of life’s cycle, was so much easier to face at night than in the daylight.

She breathed out that feeling, lifting her free hand, palm out, and pushed the sense of comfort, the peace of her god rimming the night with power.

She’d had enough conversations with wizards and sorcerers to know that they did this differently, a snap of their fingers or a desire for light. Maybe even clerics could conjure light that way; she couldn’t. She wasn’t comfortable wanting or needing something so badly she twisted what was real in front of her to fit with her desires. She had to reach for her god, and remember what it felt like to have not what she wanted, but what she needed.

And then she trusted that it would be so.

Light filled her palm; she gave her hand a bounce, and the little ball drifted upwards, positioning itself just above her head. As she had imagined, it was a quiet thing, a full moon covered by clouds, a gentle light suited this place. And, pragmatically, it was still more light than she’d had before, and without the need to sacrifice one of her hands to carry a torch.

She stepped down into the darkness that had been the cellars and storerooms, and probably the dungeon as well, and carried her light with her, a radiance that illuminated just enough even as the air cooled around her with every step down. A hallway stretched straight ahead from the bottom of the steps, so long and sloping slightly down so that her light did not reach the end of it. Doors opened off to the left and the right: storerooms, she knew, and maybe some of them would have boxes in them, even after all this time.

She walked passed them, with only a glance to be sure that her assumption was correct; reserved here away from the elements, these doors still stood closed in their frames, and probably even locked. She could, in theory, kick them each in and ensure that those she was searching for hadn’t found a way around the locks, one way or another, but the sense prickling against her skin drew her farther down, into the undercroft of what had been the castle.

Most castles didn’t have elaborate dungeons, she knew that from experience. Most only had storerooms, and perhaps a cell or two; anything more than the cells could hold, and the lord would worry more about open rebellion and arming their guard than where they were putting miscreants. “Except for the crazy ones,” she murmured, lifting her light higher to inspect the narrow iron grill on the last door before the hallway flattened and the ceiling lowered.

Of course, these guys had been the crazy ones. She proved that when she stepped off the slope, into what would have been the main cellar of the castle, and the shadows retreated from her light, racing towards the corners - and the open trapdoor bracketed by old crates.

“A less suspicious person would think this went to the wine cellar,” she said, voice echoing in the expanse, as she went to a knee in front of it, directed the light with a curl of her fingers to beam down. The steps down were cut into a stone wall, and the floor was thick enough she could only see a sliver of the level beneath the one: it was dark enough it could have been anything, including the lowest root cellar, the faint fetid smell the ghosts of a potato harvest.

But she really doubted it.

A draft from behind her was the only warning she got. “ _Shit_ ,” she hissed as she whirled, a pivot on her knee, drawing her sword.

A shadow raced towards her, like a piece of curtain torn from the darkness blowing down the ramp. It wasn’t. She barely got her sword in front of her, didn’t have time to block or strike, barely had time to brace, and then it was upon her.

Good steel chainmail and sturdy leather hauberk meant nothing to the shadow. It passed through her; ice cold lanced through her, darkness and pain, spiking out from her belly. Iswen gasped, stumbled as she forced herself to her feet, pivoting, sweeping her sword before her.

The shadow was hovering just beyond her reach, and as she watched, it congealed. A face bubbled out of the shadow, features barely more than half-formed shapes, but recognizably human, and with the shreds of shadows drifting around it like hair, a human woman at that. Tendrils of shadows came up from the wraith’s side, split into claws. “ _Why should you live?”_ the wraith hissed.

“Ah, shit,” Iswen murmured as she shifted her guard, slid a step sideways.

The lovers were definitely dead too, and trapped. She hadn’t had much hope, but the wraith made even the slivers fade.

The wraith lunged forward, its arms impossibly longer; Iswen parried, slashing for the claws. Her sword cut through the shadow-limbs, and they dissolved with little swirls like smoke rising from the wraith.

What had once been a sweet village girl drew back and hissed again. Any hope that it was in pain faded when the arm reformed, and slashed forward. Iswen retreated, sweeping her sword in a guard, and that meant the talons only sliced through her forearm instead of her torso again.

Her breath rasped as she circled, pain stabbing with every step, every breath. The wraith of the lover drifted back and forth, always just in front of her, swiping at her, the arms and claws always longer, outside her reach.

She needed space. Iswen dove to the side, and hissed as the wraith sliced through her leg, a sudden flare of cold pain up to her knee. A quick glance as she adjusted her guard showed she wasn’t bleeding, but that didn’t seem to matter; the next step nearly had her stumbling, and the wraith hissed again, this time in pleasure.

Good steel wouldn’t save her. Iswen took a deep breath - something stabbed under her ribs - let it out as she brought her sword up in front of her, and laid her fingers on the circle stamped into the crossguard of the hilt. She closed her eyes, felt the rush of air as the wraith lunged forward in triumph.

“In the name of Lord Kelemvor, _begone_ ,” she barked, and reached beyond her for the divine grace that laid souls to rest, the prayers made nearly physical. All she had to do was ask, and not get in its way when it rushed forward and filled her, and answered prayer that gave her what she needed.

Even from behind closed eyes, she could see her sword blaze with light, something like heat simmering around the edge of the blade: not warmth, but _presence_ , physical as the light. It pressed outward from her blade, and from her hands on the hilt of the sword.

The wraith shrieked, losing its features as it bubbled backwards away from light of the blade; it may not fear steel, but it damn well feared divine grace that could unmake it. Swirling, a tangle of shadows and smoke, it dove through the far wall, and was gone.

Not a victory. Iswen had to plant the tip of her sword on the floor as she stood and panted for a moment. Testing her weight on her leg, she winced, staring at the wall where the wraith had vanished. It would be back, and would likely bring the second wraith with it. And, if she was very unlucky, whatever it was that had killed them in the first place.

“No _fucking_ paladins to spare,” she snarled as she sheathed her sword and limped back over to the hole in the floor. She shifted her swordbelt to cross over one shoulder, so that her sword was flat on her back, out of the way of her legs for the climb down the carven ladder.

No god had ever promised her that if she entered their service, they would make life fair for her. It was enough that Kelemvor was with her, in the little light that hovered just over her head and the strength in her sword.


	3. Chapter 3

Iswen felt very alone when her boots hit the dusty floor of the undercroft, and her light stretched out just as many shadows as what it revealed. The square room had a vaulted ceiling, though no higher above her than an ordinary storeroom’s might be, but there all resemblance ended.

Even the faint light over her shoulder showed that the flooring underfoot was tiled with mosaic chips no larger than her thumbnail, fine and careful work, though it paled in comparison to the fresco that stretched across the back wall in front of her. There was a layer of dust too thick to make out the details, but the hairs on the back of her neck stood up as she looked at the wall, an itch along her skin and a tightness in her gut. It was like walking into a mausoleum with uncovered crypts: the insistence that something was deeply wrong and probably dangerous.

Sliding her swordbelt from over her shoulder back to her waist, she tipped her hand to direct the ball of light closer to the back wall, and muttered “thank merciful Lathander” when two braziers - one to the right and one to the left, close to the back wall - appeared out of the shadows. Her relief lasted just as long as it took to lay her fingertips in the dusty charcoal and ask for a spark of fire to light them.

Then, when she stepped back, their light lapped over the fresco, and she took back any hopeful feeling that Lathander might have inspired. “Why the fuck is it always devil-worshippers?” Or, she conceded, demon-worshippers; it wasn’t easy to tell the difference between the two, when the central figure was still half-obscured by dust and cobwebs, but the figures bending knee around it, arms uplifted in praise, were clearly mortals, just as the background radiated power from the central figure. “Oh, sure, let’s worship a being who promises power,” she muttered as she stepped back, “it’s not as though they’re known for lying or twisting their deals, we’re obviously smarter than that, what could possibly go wrong?”

And then they were so very surprised when things did go wrong, and often in ways that had nothing to do with an army knocking on their door. Iswen was surprised she hadn’t encountered more wraiths, and worse, already. Though thinking that might be tempting her luck.

With the braziers lit, there were two passages visible, one running off to the left of the back wall, the other to the right. Gesturing her own light forward for a better look, Iswen stared down each in turn, one hand on the hilt of her sword. The passage to the left turned sharply, and was swallowed up in shadow. But the passage to the right…

At the end of the short corridor, a door stood ajar, just open enough for her light to beam through. Dull gray against the black, she could make out the unmistakable shape of a stone sarcophagus, leaning forward as if trying to shuffle out the door.

It was promising - or, at least, she amended, it was _something_. Curling her fingers to beckon the light forward, she edged closer, trying not to limp on her wounded knee, through the short hallway, until she set her fingers on the askew wooden door: rough-hewn, though the panel had been worn smooth, it had a subtle wrongness to it, one that took her a moment to identify.

There was no dust.

The hairs on the back of her neck and arms stood up as she eased passed the first sarcophagus, a chill running down her spine as she saw another laying in front of her, and still more in tangled rows as far as her light could reach. Some stood up against the walls, others simply were shoved too tightly against each other or at crooked angles. None of them were exactly the same, but none of them could have been brought through the door, much less down the staircase

It was not the same as what she felt in the ruins above, but still a twisted sense of _wrongness_ to the too-still, too-clean air. She looked over her shoulder at the first sarcophagus, and could have sworn that it had turned to follow her. It didn’t have eyes, of course; the effigy statue of the occupant was mercifully missing from the lid. But she could sense its weight, and in the air there was the brooding presence, as if it wanted nothing more than to tip over and crush her.

Unsettled dead. Iswen breathed out a longer breath, and loosed her sword in its sheath. She wouldn’t call the sensation familiar, but it had damn well strengthened after she’d sworn vows to Kelemvor. Now when she sensed undead - or even would-be-undead - the air went still around her, as if they could sense her in turn, and were waiting to see what she did about them.

There was no way but forward. Or, as _forward_ as she could manage in the clutter of sarcophagi and coffins, when she had to pick her way between and around. The worst were the ones that were in the shape of the body within, the stone carving too detailed, sending whispers of an unnatural cause rippling down her spine as she tried to edge her way around the curved coffins without touching them, and without meeting the eyes that stared up unseeing from the head.

No, compared to them, the preserved wood coffins stacked atop each other in rows were almost normal, and the sarcophagi with effigy merely had a quiet dignity to them. She lingered over more than one, looking down at humans and elves and dwarves, warriors in their armor and wizards in robes so detailed the folds were visible, and all had the same sadness around their mouths and closed eyes, as if they had lain down to rest because they could fight no more, and had never gotten up.

And here they were trapped, one way or another, however they’d come to be here. “I’m sorry,” she murmured as she stepped back from one. It seemed such a small thing, for she could not promise that she would see them removed from this place, or even that fighting the wraiths would free them. But she felt something around her ease, as if they’d all sighed, accepting what little she could offer.

As she worked her way back and forth across the room, picking her way deeper and deeper in, she only caught rare glimpses of the back wall, and with the shadows that leapt from sarcophagus to wall and back with the movements of the light, wasn’t entirely sure where it actually was. She turned a corner of another double-stack of coffins, glossy dark wood gleaming in her faint light, and nearly stepped back; the back wall reared up ahead of her, a sweeping open semi-circle in front of it.

Iswen lifted her little light higher, stepping first back from the wall to take it all in at once, then swaying closer, intrigued by the details. She had an uncle in Calimshan, and the pride of his manor was his courtyard wall: a row of morning glory vines with their deep purple flowers open out of season, vivid against the green of the vines and the rosy sandstone of the wall. The first time she’d seen it as a child, it had been only by touching it that she’d found that most of the vines were not living plants, but a very clever mosaic of tile and glass, eternally green and blooming.

This was the same, and she even thought she’d seen similar examples of the subject of the artwork, mostly in tombs like this one. An archway lifted nearly to the ceiling, and within, the hallway appeared to continue down a darkening road with perfect illusionary perspective; when she reached forward, she nearly expected her hand to go through the wall, instead of coming to rest flat on cold stone. Even with her hand on the stone, even looking closely enough to see the joins and mortar between the tiles, the longer she stared at it, the more her heart insisted that she would fall into it.

Iswen pulled back from the wall, and lifted her light higher. Around the curve of the archway, floor to ceiling and back to floor, were rune-markings that swirled red and gold, dim in the pale light but unfaded. Not that she could read what they were; that would require a mage, she thought, or at least someone familiar with ancient magical languages.

Her light crossed over the peak at least, and there, at the capstone, something gleamed with a metallic shimmer before being swallowed up in shadow again. That single pulse was all it took to set her back a step or three, not a trace of malevolence itself, but still something powerful and opposed to her.

“What in all Nine Hells…?” she murmured, and her quiet words might have been too loud for the unhappy crypt, but felt muffled and suppressed. There was a puzzle here, but one she was in no way qualified to unravel. It was more than enough that the dead had been brought here, trapped here, and the archway that was more than mere decoration. But she knew well enough that if she tried to chip away at the wall with her sword, all she’d get would be a broken sword; if there was still magic here, it was not the sort she could disrupt on her own.

There was just no path clear to her, no doorways off this end: the only way out was back.

But leaving things as they were was intolerable; she could not turn her back and walk away from this untidy and unhappy crypt. She closed her eyes, closed her hand over the chain around her neck, took several deep breaths, and quietly asked, “Now what?”

The gods rarely literally spoke, even to their most devout. But they were more than capable of giving a nudge in the right direction. This time, when she opened her eyes and focused on the arch, it was not the casual curiosity that pulled her, but a sharp tug in her gut, an utter conviction of what she had to do. She laid her palm back on the stones, right at the point where the illusionary hallway vanished into the distance, and reached passed stone and earth and life to the quiet place that stood between life and death, and listened.

 _Anger_. _Pain_. _Trapped_. She could almost feel the stones beating against her palm with the words, and knew more than she had a right to. There was a spirit - there was _someone_ \- caught in whatever magic the mosaic arch contained. Trapped, as the lovers and the acolyte were trapped.

And she knew how to set such things to rest, whether it was one of them or a spirit bound to this crypt

It was just as well the space in front of the arch was open, Iswen thought as she checked her surroundings, pulling her salt-cellar from her belt pouch - the salt-cellar too large to have been in the pouch, but magic only sometimes cared about the size of things. But in this case, even a very small circle of salt needed enough room to hold all of her, and she didn’t want to move any of the tombs. She unhooked her sheath from her belt, laid the sword close to hand, but out of the way of what she needed to do: a circle of salt, poured carefully from the box, a whispered prayer for protection.

She pulled a bottle from the pouch, poured out the holy water in a gleaming silver stream just inside the line of salt, and her prayers were for guidance. Kneeling in the center of the two circles, she withdrew another box from her pouch, and this time poured out a little mound of incense, one she lit with a simple tongue of fire - all the fire she could call, but enough. The rich muskiness of the sandalwood smoke curled about her, and she extended her hands, palms cupped, and offered the third and final prayer, the one dedicated entirely to this purpose.

She called to the unsettled spirit, but it was her own that she felt stretching out, pulled like wool being spun into yarn, and drawn forward. Forward, towards the undeniably magical archway.

As gray mist filled her eyes, Iswen had to figure that this was not going to be a usual exorcism. “Fuck,” she heard her voice sigh from far away, and then the magic took her to where she needed to be, to the spirit.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was written before Timeless came out. Certain background details may or may not apply.

The stone floor was icy, and the air of the small cavern was little warmer. Zaknafein savored the lovebite of almost-pain on his bare feet, the way his breath hung as a plume before him and echoed back off the smooth walls. Beneath his skin, his muscles warmed as they stretched, and the tightness from the cold loosened into smooth grace, familiar and pleasing. But not nearly as much as the weight of the swords in his hands, the wire-wrapped scimitar hilts perfectly fitted to callouses nearly as old as he was, the weight of them nothing more than comfort.

Something buried in his heart stirred uneasily when he looked at them: it was hard not to be grateful, when they were all he had here. They were all he’d ever had, and that made the gratitude taste like ash.

He prowled the circuit of the cavern, blades flicking around him as he worked through the drill, and each crease and dip in the floor was as familiar as the strikes and parries. Thirty paces and he was back where he started; his breath was coming no faster, but he could hear it hiss louder through his teeth as he stabbed downward, twisted the second through the parry and riposte.

Thirty paces, and he’d lost count of how many times he’d made the circuit this drill alone, how many times around the tight cavern it took to chain together this sword dance. The light in this place never changed, and he couldn’t even see where it came from; he had no way to count the hours or days - or longer? - he had been here.

It didn’t matter, he told himself, as long as he had his swords.

He did not have pells, that invaluable tool in judging proper blade position and reach. He used the walls.

Leaping forward, nearly too close, he slashed at them, high and low, right and left. The stone rang dull against the metal of the blade, and the noise of it nearly drowned out the thunder of his heartbeat in his ears as he attacked again and again, long after he had struck every angle with each sword.

He hated lowering his swords in this place, but one clattered to the floor, the sound distant as he reached forward and brushed his fingertips over the wall. Over the _smooth_ wall. He knew the blades were adamantium, or the like, as fine as any he’d ever owned; they were never nicked, or even so much as scratched, no matter what he did to them.

But nor were the walls ever marred, no matter how he struck them. He thought he had tried every combination of angle and strength by now, and when the subtle angles hadn’t worked, had once bashed the hilts against the wall. He hadn’t really thought it would work, but the hilts had only rang like bells, turning his palms numb enough he had nearly dropped them.

This time could not have been different, but his heart flipped over as his fingers crossed smooth, cool stone; one of his callouses should have caught on something, even if it wasn’t visible.

His fingers curled against the wall, digging at the stone, and his head sagged towards the wall. “No…” His hoarse words were as ineffective as the swords, and not just because his voice was nearly broken from lack of use.

There were no cracks in the walls, not in all thirty paces of the circuit. He’d checked. And now he checked again, hating himself for doing so when the answer could not change. They remained perfect, black and cold, soaring high above his head, into blackness.

He’d even tried to levitate once, staring up into blackness and willing himself up. But he’d never been a noble, had never been able to do it because of his blood, and the emblem that had permitted it was lost somewhere in the Underdark, far beyond his reach.

Even the fan of alcoves at one end had only bitter hope, the sort created just to have yanked away as soon as the desperate reached for it; each alcove had a door. But those doors were translucent and floated shoulder-high off the ground, and when he’d curiously put his arm through one, it had gone numb for...a time. He didn’t know how long. But he had not tried again.

The cold of the wall seemed to sap his strength from him, eating away at his muscles right along with his will until he sagged towards it, his shoulders down and his swords too heavy to balance, all the ghosts of his wounds crying out against his skin at the cold and the weight around him.

Once, he’d thought that death would be an escape, and twice he’d had the courage to embrace it.

He could still feel the itch of acid on his skin, smell the metallic tang of it burning deep into his nose, something less than pain as it ate away the dead flesh. When he fell deeper, his chest blazed with pain, bright and hot, along the impossible scar, and the knife lifted high above him dripped with blood.

He’d slipped again. Zak opened his red eyes, gathered his strength as he stepped back from the wall. There was no time here, and so, he was not tired. As he was not tired, he did not need to rest, and so he would not remember.

He wasn’t sure if that was true, or if he was lying to himself.

He stooped to retrieve his fallen sword, brushed his fingers over the floor, and the cold, at least, was real. Zak drew in a deep breath, and held to those few things he knew were true: he was alive, and this place was real. He had his breath, the warmth of worked muscles, the grounding bite of cold and pain, and the weight of a sword in each hand. All of that was true and real.

A ripple of wind circled around the cavern, and his head lifted, hackles raising. There was _never_ a wind, not here. There couldn’t be. There certainly couldn’t be a low voice on the wind, groaning a single word: _“Sojourner_.”

It was impossible. Everything he had seen here insisted that it was: no crevasses to make a breeze, much less an exit, and no one here but him. And yet, Zaknafein had not lived nearly as long as he had in the Underdark without being able to sense danger around him.

And for all he’d been alone before, there was someone standing behind him now.

He pivoted and thrust, a reflex more than a hope. His sword struck true, and yet he could only stare at his opponent, the hilt looser in his hand than it had any right to be after nearly four hundred years of wielding one.

He’d never seen a human before; they were rare, in the slave pits of Menzoberranzan, and never lived long among the drow. He wasn’t entirely sure he was seeing one now, not when he was seeing _through_ her, the shimmering translucent doors playing patterns over her translucent robes that might be gray, or might just be reflecting the walls behind them. She was certainly no elf, with her rounded ears and face that lacked the sharply arched beauty of his kind - though, under the circumstances, he couldn’t tell much else about her features besides that.

The ghostly figure looked down at the foot of adamantium piercing her chest, then back up at him. “Well, that’s fucking rude,” she said. Her form shimmered, and she slipped to the side, out of his sword. “I have it on decent authority that you should introduce yourself before you stab someone.” One of her hands made a little gesture, maybe a circle. “More or less, anyways.”

Zak lowered his sword, drooping in something that wasn’t even a low guard, though he couldn’t bring himself to sheath it. Had that been a quip? “Is that how your assassins operate?” he asked, because apparently his tongue had decided that it _was_ a quip, whether answering her instead of stabbing again was truly sensible.

The spirit or ghost or projected mind or whatever she was seemed to consider: her outline became a little more solid, enough for him to see a heavy medallion hanging from around her throat, and anger rose with familiar comforting heat into his chest. He could think of only one thing that wore _that_ kind of necklace, and his swords nearly came back up to another strike.

 _Priestess_.

Although…priestess or not, she probably wasn’t going to hurt him; if she was going to, or even could, she’d have retaliated when he stabbed her. Though she could be waiting for him to drop his guard, figuratively as well as literally, and the thought was edged with cynicism that was as familiar as the anger; it just took the heat away and made him cold and hard as the stone floors under his bare feet.

“You know,” she said with all appearance of thoughtfulness, “I really don’t know. Is that what you were, in life, an assassin?”

He couldn’t help the rough noise, the sting of a life that was a past-tense still raw. “ _Lady priestess,”_ he said, his tongue twisting the familiar words into the familiar insult. “I am a drow weaponsmaster-” In death as well as in life. “A soldier, not an assassin. Not more than any other drow,” he added with a quick twist of his swordpoint in a warrior’s shrug. If his foes never saw him coming, that was their problem, not his intent. More or less, anyways.

She made a noise much the same as his. “I am as much a priestess as you are an assassin,” she said, and if her words were wry, there was a blade under them as well, a warning not to push against that line of questioning. “My point is, what can I call you?”

She didn’t ask for his name, not directly, and his kind well knew the difference between direct questions and inferred ones. “You first,” he shot back.

“I am known as Doomguide,” she said. She gestured, a sense of spread hands towards him, though it was hard to tell, being there was only a ripple of blue outlines around and in front of her. He still caught the intent well enough: _Now you_.

He hesitated, swords momentarily too-still, frozen in his hands. In battle, it would get him killed; in the skirmish of drow conversation, it’d get him killed slower, or end up with a whip across his back that was all-too physical. He just couldn’t seem to help himself. She hadn’t offered her name; there were similar words he could use in return, and even if she seemed to expect it, she still wouldn’t be the wiser. He had the half thought to claim the name _Jarlaxle D’aerthe_ , to honor a friend with a raised _dead spider_ gesture.

But he couldn’t, didn’t want to claim that as his, even for such a thing as a false name for a priestess to use.

He prevaricated, leaning his weight back, swords dipping lower again as if this was truly a casual conversation. “Strange names your kind have,” he said.

The priestess snorted. It was quite audible, even if nothing of her was solid. “Well, my mama always told me never to give my name to strange drow, so, _Doomguide_ will do.”

Amusement, warm and scented of mushroom beer, coiled around his anger, strangling it. “True wisdom from your Matron Mother,” he said. “Zaknafein,” he added before he could think better of it, and sheathed his swords.

The ghostly outline of her head moved, something more obvious than a nod but less than a bow. “Zaknafein, then,” she repeated. A shiver ran down his spine, but that might have been from the stone floor. Nothing hooked into him, and he felt no greater compulsion to kneel to her than he had before.

If there was one priestess in his life who had ever meant him no harm, she was it.

“Well, then,” Doomguide said. “Where are we?”

Zak blinked. She might not mean him harm, but apparently, there was nothing to suggest that she would actually be helpful. “You’re the one who showed up here,” he pointed out. _Doomguide_. A doomed guide? Perhaps she was as trapped here as he was.

Doomguide snorted again, and her form twisted around itself, momentarily turning her into a shimmering column of blue and gray, a warm light against the cold of the walls. He’d never felt his chest ease at the presence of light before, a knot of pain he couldn’t say was physical loosening. “Yes, and this is not where I expected to find you,” she said. “It’s certainly not the Fugue Plane.”

“You were looking for me?” he asked before he could think better of the question.

Her arms spread, or perhaps she simply grew in size, strengthening. “Why else would I be here?” she said, and given the bare room, she had a point.

 _Doomguide._ A guide to the doomed? He bitterly knew that he could be counted as one of those. Only he found it very hard to imagine any goddess - or anything else that moved through the planes beyond death - taking an interest in him now that he was useless; what good was a warrior who’d lost a battle? “Why me?” he demanded.

Worse would be if something _had_ , though; nothing good in his life had ever come from another being interested in him, from Jarlaxle to Malice to Lolth.

“Because you’re dead,” she said simply. “And you’re not where you’re supposed to be.”

A bitter laugh barked from his throat, one he didn’t bother try to smother, not in front of her. “And that’s important to you?”

“It’s important to _you_ ,” she said softly, and if he couldn’t see her face, much less her eyes, he could still tell she was looking directly into his; it felt like having his skin peeled back and a hand wrapped around his heart.

But, having felt that before, he had to admit, her gaze was unsettling, but it wasn’t painful. She saw far too much, but that was all she did. She did not crook her finger and pull on the dark, hollow parts in him that far too long in the Underdark had ground into him, use them to twist his soul around her wrist and into her hand.

She looked, and saw, and not only did she not look through him to her own gain, she didn’t look away.

“Unless of course you want to stay here,” she added with a tart tone so familiar he could have harmonized with it.

And really, how could he resist? “I don’t know,” he said, and felt as though he finally knew what he was standing on. “I haven’t finished counting the flagstones yet. It’s a very diverting hobby.”

“Take up knitting,” she suggested, and it didn’t matter that he had no idea just what _knitting_ was, he conceded the point to her with a small bow. “Now, then,” she said, her voice softening from its quick edges of parries, “What is this place?” She turned in a circle again, slower and broader.

“If you’re waiting for me to answer that question, you’re going to be waiting a long time, even by my reckoning,” Zak said dryly. “I…found myself here. After.” His throat was tight, but to clear it would draw attention to it. He hooked his hands over his swords instead, running calloused fingers along the wire-wrapped hilts for comfort.

“After you were killed?” Doomguide said, and if her words were gentle, they were direct, and his stomach turned, sour and twisted. She didn’t brighten, didn’t move closer to him, but something in the way she paused made him realized she was focusing on him again, a sharper point of consideration than before. “That wasn’t on an altar in a surface temple surrounded by black-robed priests calling to a pack of devils, by chance.”

It was a strangely specific description, enough Zak almost wanted to ask where she’d plucked it from. But there was a larger part of him that knew no good ever came from asking those sorts of questions of priestesses. If she had her own motives for being here, he would just make sure their purposes coincided.

He shook his head. “Underdark.” If his back felt too cold from the memory of House Do’Urden’s altar, well, he didn’t need to confess that: it wasn’t _her_ altar, clearly.

“Shit,” she muttered, quiet but remarkably distinct.

This time, Zak did raise an eyebrow. “I can’t imagine your goddess approves of the swearing,” he said with mock consternation.

“Don’t you fucking start too,” she muttered, such a wealth of feeling and history underlaying it that he had to chuckle. A pity he had no interest in the tales of priestess squabbles; he had the sense that her descriptions of rivalries and bickering and backstabbing would at least be entertaining, even if the subject was trite.

She drifted back and forth, as if she was pacing, and then she turned her back on him and faced the doors. “Have those always been like that?” she asked.

He’d been away from it probably longer than it had seemed, but he was still used to following the jumps in a priestess’s line of questioning, and at least her strange pattern of questions weren’t likely to get him killed. “Since I’ve been here,” he said, and also didn’t bother keeping the bitterness out of his voice as he eyed them again.

The fact that they were floating was the worse part, he decided. You could try to open a door if it was connected to a wall, or at least set on the floor; even if you opened something half above your head, what good would it do you?

Though…as Doomguide drifted closer to the nearest, he realized that the translucent doors were limed in the same blue-white light that she was. It made it hard to tell where she ended and they began, as she circled one completely. It probably explained why he didn’t have a chance to stop her before she shoved her arm through the translucent door.

She yelped in pain and jumped back, her outline wavering and parts of her turning entirely transparent, fading from view. “The Nine Hells?” she said.

“The doors bite,” Zak informed her.

“So I see,” she grumbled. She solidified again, at least as much as she could. She looked between the door and him, and then asked, probably more to herself than to him, “Why are they locked?” He felt her attention focus on him, honing like a blade pointed at his heart. “Where’s the key?”

He spread his arms. “You are welcome to look through the walls,” he said with heavy sarcasm. “Tell me how it goes.” And if she did find a way out, he’d be right on her heels.

“I think you’re the key,” she said slowly, and drifted closer to him. She didn’t loom as large as she once had, but the slow, steady movement was nearly as threatening.

“You are aware that I know the doors bite from personal experience?” he asked rhetorically even as a cold finger traced down his spine. If she tried to cut it out of him…well, he had swords and she didn’t, and even if she did have magic, she wouldn’t be the first unarmed priestess he’d killed.

“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently. “I don’t think the doors are the point of this place. I think _you_ are.”

Zak scoffed. “Because one drow warrior is clearly a central playing piece,” he said.

“Do you have a better explanation?” Doomguide demanded. “You’re here. Not on the Fugue Plane where the dead should go. _Here_. It has to matter.”

Zak swallowed, and turned away from her to pace the curve of the wall. The cold of the stones felt like heat, radiating out and lashing at his skin, too real to ignore. He was indeed _here,_ and he would jump into each of the Nine Hells in succession before he admitted to her how much the thought twisted around his belly, sickened and exhausted him.

Even dead, it seemed a greater power could pick him up and deposit him somewhere, without so much as noticing what he felt or wanted, not caring if he died again - or wanted to.

He’d bash his swords against the wall again, if he thought it would help in the slightest. If it wouldn’t have drawn her dangerous attention to him again. His voice cracking the air did enough of that anyways, bladed words tossed over his shoulder: “Maybe I’m here as a gift for you.”

“Because I need the practice dealing with cranky spirits,” she muttered, and Zak was fairly sure he’d been meant to hear that. “Look, Zaknafein,” she said on a sigh. The sound of his name made him look over, and he told himself it was natural. Just part of conversations. It wasn’t a tie to his soul, not a demand of his obedience. “However you got here, you can’t get out on your own, or you’d have done so already,” she said, and her voice was so gentle and reasonable he wanted to cut her throat. If she had a throat.

Whenever Malice had bothered to be gentle and reasonable with him, patting him on the head the way she would a pet spider who’d brought her a dead mouse, he had always known he’d lost. Lost a battle, lost his status, lost the only thing he ever really wanted, and Malice enjoyed it. She’d always enjoyed humbling him.

He’d thought there was nothing left for him to lose. Evidently, he’d been wrong: he’d always had his pride, even if it hadn’t quite kept him warm. “Then, _lady priestess_ ,” he said, jaw tight, “do what you will.”

“I’m not a priestess,” she said, but it was to herself again. She fell silent, turning inward, away from him, and his mouth twitched as he continued pacing the curve of the chamber opposite to the fan of the doors. So it seemed she had pretty words and not the faintest idea of what to do with him; he weighed relief on one hand against scorn on the other and wasn’t quite sure where the balance point was. He could only be grateful that he wouldn’t be twisted around her hands, but, for a minute he’d hoped that she could free him.

The air seemed to warm, something moving around him, the way it had just before she’d appeared, and he looked up to find that she was studying him again. “I wonder…” she said, and it was her words, so quiet and fragile, that had moved the air. It couldn’t warm him, not those speculative notes in her voice combined with the intent in her eyes.

She couldn’t hurt him, he reminded himself. His sword had struck through her without slicing off pieces, and so even if she reached into his chest, she would grasp nothing.

She seemed to have different thoughts on the matter. “Come here,” she said. “Give me your hands.”

Zak stopped pacing, arching an eyebrow. “How exactly do you expect that to work?”

He wasn’t entirely sure he was meant to her her answer: “We’re going to find out,” she muttered.

It was the uncertainty in her voice, of all things, that decided him, had him circling in towards her again, that most fragile and unlikely connection tugging him in a spiral to her. How many times over his long life had a priestess told him something in a sharp-edged voice, immalleable as adamantium, and he’d known that all their towering conviction was _wrong,_ in battle plans and morals alike, and both would break if he threw a stone at them. Just as even the finest adamantium blade had to have subtle enchantments worked over it before it could be forged; adamantium was strong, but a thin blade was so rigid that it would shatter if struck right, not a scratch on any of the pieces but still broken.

Standing in front of her, he met her eyes, and even if he could barely tell where they were on her face, he could see they were not adamantium, but steel: certain and steady under his hand, but willing to bend under the right conditions.

He’d always trusted cold-forged steel over the magic woven through a blade, no matter the advantages to weight and the edge.

He still drew a deep breath before extending his hands to her, and held it as her form shifted, straightening and growing before her arms came up and reached forward to his. The blue light outlining her played over his black skin, casting back faded shadows, before lowering that inch more, and setting on his skin.

He expected her to be warm. He expected to be able to feel her hand flexing around his, gripping and prodding. Energy rippled around his hand, like the prickle from the doors just before they bit, a little cool breeze chasing around his hands, but that was all. Her heard her - or someone - let out a long breath, an echo of that breeze that raced around the cavern instead, and he wished it the joy of finding its way out.

It didn’t. The breath strengthened, twisted to catch its tail in fangs, grew in size as if seeking the ceiling and never finding it. Behind Doomguide, the doors shimmered, not like they had when they’d spat him out, but all along their edges, wavering and blurring and bobbing higher and lower, the way Doomguide had when she’d been thinking. It made the gray walls blur more than they already were, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw colors flicker and crawl. Every time he looked, they were gone, and it was only the dappled gray walls.

Doomguide spoke. For all his keen hearing, for all he’d heard her swearing and doubts, this time he couldn’t hear her. The words were torn away to join the wind, and when the did, the walls darkened; her light didn’t dim, but nor did it seem to be important, not when the shadows closed over him, black and oppressive as —

The Underdark.

This time, when color flared along the wall, he understood. Out of the darkening shadows, over her shoulder, a street stretched off into the impossible distance - narrow, twisting between stalagmites and with the fangs of stalactites biting down above, little notches in the stone limed in flickering red lines of light to indicate the doors everyone might know about. For one moment, he couldn’t recognize it, but then the image turned around a corner, and there was a glyph scratched into a low lintel: not magic, not even power, except the power that a tavern always held.

 _Freedom_ had, for a time, tasted like the smoked _velve_ mushroom skewers, rubbed with the blend of spices the chef had kept so closely guarded that they’d all had to drunkly speculate about them, some kind of drow impulse to chase a secret just because it was dangled in front of them.

“ _What -”_ he snarled, but before he could finish the accusation, the image dissolved, ripped apart into shreds of black and gray and the faintest twist of red that was soon drowned, and Zak breathed again. Not a memory: not the full memory, anyways. Just…

“It had meant something to you,” Doomguide said, and her voice echoed, resonate over the winds. “It still means something to you.”

As if she’d tugged them out as handily has she had the image, his chest tightened around the words, and images that tied to things he could never put into words. The walls spun and blurred, and there was another path before him, this one a narrow corridor, darker than the back alley of Menzoberranzan; movement from the corner, a cross-section, and his heart didn’t just twist and ache with rage, it burned. It didn’t even matter that he couldn’t remember this particular corridor, this particular fight. All that mattered was the beating of his heart and the twist of his mouth and the smooth elegance of the hilt in his hand.

A drow male - young, with a notched left ear - knelt in front of him, and it wasn’t anger in his chest, but the leaden weight of disappointment. “So promising,” he said, and for the life that was still in him, couldn’t say if it was the memory, or if he was trying to explain what he was going to do to Doomguide, make her understand the twisted logic to drow life that made vice virtue and virtue vice. “So obedient,” he sneered as a whip - as his whip - cracked, and the male’s head turned to the side, carefully lowered, so careful not to move more than that, not even to reach up to the blood streaming down his other ear, a matching pair of notches.

A pair of blades, spinning in his hands. He could close his eyes and feel them, like phantom hands, the hilts a softer caress than any lovers’ touch. Skin under his palms, a musk in his nose, worse than the silken strand of hair that slipped into his mouth as maliciously as if she’d tried to be in his way; her laugh, the nip of her teeth against his ear and the drag of her nails down his back, his own blood blooming, one more thing to hate about this bed of hers. A collar around his neck, choking even as he was the obedient one for her - maybe it was his own anger, his own hypocrisy, his own defiant need to be _better_ than every other drow around him.

Malice had put him in a cage. But his own nature had been more of the bars than her orders.

Against all the grays of the walls, the black of the Underdark, the flicks of white hair and red eyes and redder blood, the purple light washed it all away. His whirling thoughts slowed, and once more, the walls stretched into a different room. Simple; not the painful elegant simplicity of the audience hall, but simple because the room itself didn’t matter. It was only a place to store weapons, and then to dance with them and a partner. He watched two shadows sparring, back and forth, and for a moment, their anonymous movements soothed, brought other, cleaner words to his tongue: _circle parry-riposte counter left; backslash counter right; high strike high guard low feint high slash; back recover, sidestep pivot low strike circle parry-riposte_ …

He could have watched his shadow fight his opponent for all the rest of his life. But then the purple light flickered again, no more than a single bright color against all the ugliness and defiant of all darkness. And his attention shot back to Doomguide, honed on her expression like a wary guard. If she saw what he did, she made no sign of it, and no sooner than he looked back at her, then the light strengthened and the winds ebbed, tearing apart the image, shredding it like a sword tearing apart a faded rag.

Once more, he was standing in the middle of the impossible room with the bright spirit, and his heart ached for the loss.

“It still means much to you,” Doomguide repeated, so very gentle again that she couldn’t have seen what he had. “But you cannot cling to it anymore. You have to let go.”

“It was my life,” Zak said, looking in vain for anything of it here. But there were only the doors, locked and barred to him, and the stone walls that were not the caverns of the Underdark, and nothing else.

“And now it’s over,” Doomguide said, simple fact, though her voice was far warmer than her hands. “The doors won’t open until you’re free to move through them.”

She said it so dispassionately, as if all of it mattered no more than the images that had played over the walls. But the memories moved under his skin, tangled in his mind and strangled his heart in his throat. “I can’t - it was my _life,_ ” he repeated, the only thing that truly mattered.

Every horrible and twisted day had been his; all his rage at being trapped, all his anger directed towards the drow around him in general and those who manipulated him in particular, all the defiant skill on the battlefield and in a Matron’s bed, all the moments of peace that had shown so much brighter against the twisted shadows of the Underdark. “You would make me _nothing.”_

She made a rude noise that was surprisingly charming, even under the circumstances; it cut the last of the darkness and priestess-mysticism, made him feel the cold stone beneath his bare feet again. “You can’t be nothing. You lived - nothing can every change that. But you’re not alive any longer. You can’t go back, no more than you can keep reliving the same battle, hoping to find something else you could have done.”

Zak had to snort. “Clearly you’ve never been a drow weaponsmaster,” he said. “Picking apart the flaws in our plans to do better next time is the least offensive skill we cultivate.” He could almost feel the gnarled knots of the mushroom stalk-table under his palms, not polished but worn smooth; for every battle he’d fought, he’d spent two nights leaning on that table in the war room. There was nothing under his hands now, not even the warmth of someone else’s skin; if he didn’t look, he could forget that her hands were still on his, light and energy.

“Yes,” she said. There was an echo of knowledge in her voice, bitter and sad. Zak refused to be swayed by it, refused to wonder who she’d been - if she was dead like him, and had learned this lesson the long, hard way, the only way drow ever seemed to learn things. She was just a priestess, and he had never wasted a minute of his life pitying them.

But he wasn’t alive now.

“But,” she continued, “you still can’t walk back onto that same battlefield and change what happened. You move on to the next battle.”

He pulled his hands from her, took a step back, gestured at the entirety of the empty chamber, the thirty paces between hovering doors and smooth curve of the wall. “What next battle?” he demanded.

“Well — shit,” she muttered, quick and distracted; her head jerked away to stare into the middle distance as her outline blurred, the light fading in patches inside her body. “ _Shit_ ,” she repeated, with all the considerable vehemence that had been lacking before. “Something’s wrong,” she muttered. “Something’s — _Stay here_ ,” she said fiercely, rounding on him. “I need to go. Something’s gone very wrong.” Her words tumbled out, fast steps over broken ground. “I’ll be back when I can, I’m going to help you, just stay here and don’t do anything foolhardy.”

And with that, she was gone, as suddenly as she had appeared, not even the air stirring in her wake; Zak stared at the place where she had been, half-expecting her to reappear, the chill of the cavern slowly settling over his shoulders again, a whisper in the back of his mind that she’d never been there at all, that he was merely so desperately alone that —

That he’d come up with a priestess - a human priestess - who was actually useful, except without magic, without weapons, with only questions he wasn’t convinced she’d actually known the answers to. No, doubting his senses was the paved path that lead to madness. She had to have been real, or else…

She had to have been real. Zaknafein looked up at the hovering doors, and their faint blue glow cast no shadows on the ground. Just as she hadn’t. If she’d been real, so were the doors; she had come from somewhere, and perhaps the same place that the doors were connected to, no matter they didn’t answer to her any more than they’d answered to him.

 _Move on to the next battle_. And then she’d fled, running back to wherever she’d come from, and if she hadn’t been panicked, there had still been just as much fear in her voice as anger. Of course a priestess had always had another battle before her; he’d have been shocked if she didn’t have a path of battles behind or before her. But she hadn’t very well asked for his help, hadn’t eyed the drow weaponsmaster and crooked a finger, taken him up as just another weapon.

He had lived almost four hundred years in the Underdark, and his days had been much the same, the same battles with different drow, different passages in the Underdark, but with the same vision that had burned away the shadows and the games and the perverted pleasures, seen them for what they were in light. He had been murdered on the altar of Lolth, and it had not been a loss; not to the city of Menzoberranzan, and not to him. He had finally won a victory, won a sliver of peace, that could not be snatched away from him. Until it had been, and he’d died all over again in defiant joy.

Sacrifice had brought him here.

Zak smoothed his hands over the hilts of his swords, the solid promise of them, the little catches as the wire-wrapped hilt settled into his callouses; drawing them, he weighed them, letting the points rise and fall, the faint light playing over the keen edge. It hadn’t been raw talent that had made him the greatest weaponsmaster in a thousand generations, so that even mighty Baenre hesitated to fight him. He’d needed the swords, needed the practice, needed the time and the space where the world was not dark, was not cruel, was not calculating or plotting, but was just the battle; he’d thrown himself into every fight seeking that quiet mind, even as he’d known that the swords were the only thing he could trust.

He’d trusted them so much, he’d never questioned where they’d come from now, no more than he’d questioned why he was dressed in shirt and trousers, what he’d always worn when he trained. His swords were simply a part of him.

This place was the prison, and the lock. He was the key to the doors, the key to this place. _Move on to the next battle_.

Zaknafein crossed the circular chamber, and if his breath yet hung in the air, every step burned. He picked the middle door, and strode directly up to its threshold. It still shimmered, still hovered, pale blue bordering mottled gray stone, translucent and menacing the way only something could be when it was also the only hope he had.

Twice, he’d chosen to lay aside his swords and die to save another. This time, he flipped the hilts in his hands, no proper grip, and plunged both swords into the center of the door. The blow rang like a gong struck to call the House to prayer, vibrations he’d always felt against his skin crawling up his arms, the blades trembling as the walls sang with the echoes. He tugged, all reflex, but the translucent stone closed around the blade, as solid as if it was real, and all the good he did was slip his hands from the hilts and step back.

The swords stayed there, plunged into the door.

This time, he gave up his swords to live.

The echoes crested, too loud for the space - for any space. The low notes turned into a high pitched drone in his ears, and he stepped back again as the door swam in front of his eyes and the cold stone floor heaved and roiled, sending him to a knee.

The door followed him. Zaknafein stared, forced his wavering vision clear, and found it was no illusion, no trick of the shuddering room. The door had dropped from its loft perch, until now it sat on the ground, lintel and threshold fitted to the alcove.

And the stone door was solid, rough-hewn gray granite, with no trace of the two swords, or any mark where they had struck. As he watched, the ringing in his ears slowly ebbing and the cavern settling, the door swung open, silent and smooth and impossible as ever, a thing done only by untrustable magic. It opened onto black _nothing,_ something only slightly more promising than if it had been the blank gray wall. That would have made far more sense.

Just as it made no sense to have a single curved blade laying on the threshold. Not one of his; the blade gleamed too bright for adamantium, the edge honed too keen for steel, the hilt dull bronze capped with a battered orb for the pommel. The weight of the unseen ceiling pressed down on his shoulders, throbbed against his ears as his hands itched for the hilt, the aching emptiness at his hips after only a handful of minutes without a sword. But what good could come of a gift with no strings?

But what good could he do without it?

The air hummed, low and steady, almost a wind. He recognized it a moment later, when the words from nothing came again: _“Go, Sojourner_.” Not Doomguide, he knew that now. He didn’t know who it actually was, and didn’t much care.

“Far be it for me to overstay my welcome,” he muttered, and surged to his feet. Three strides, and he stooped to snatch the sword on the way past. He lunged for the door, and was through the blackness in a heartbeat.

The world moved around him, a tumble of shadow and sense between one long step and the next. He could not call it magic, not when after that breathless rush of movement over and around and through him, his foot fell on tile, the scent of dust flooded his nose, and the sense of the ceiling above him had the subtler senses of a race born to the black Underdark humming.

And he could feel his heart beat. That, more than the uncertain footing, more than the sudden clap of steadiness from being outside the portal, had him falling to his knees again in the underground chamber, so like the other except for that one true point: it was real.

And so was he.

So real, pain singed up his skin as something bowled him over and knocked him into the solid wall.


	5. Chapter 5

Iswen gasped against the shock of breathing again. The sandalwood smoke and burned dust filled her nose, her eyes stinging with the sudden light of her still-hovering globe and the sharp shadows of the crypt. Her leg cried piteously with prickles and needle-pains beneath her, kneeling on cold stone floors having done the wraith-wound no favors.

All minor discomforts faded from her mind at the sight of the two wraiths hovering just outside her circle, shadows moving against the blackness. “And there you are,” Iswen muttered, staring at the smaller wraith, one she shouldn’t have been able to recognize in the usual course of things. But she knew it for the one she’d banished by the gleeful little darts of its shadowy form, back and forth and forward to test the bonds of her salt and holy water wards. The being that had been the village girl sensed a victory, and retribution; the other seemed larger, moved slower, drifting a spiral around her, its tattered shadows brushing down towards the stone floor, never quite close enough to smudge the line of salt.

Iswen dragged in a carefully deep breath, and this one only half-smelled of the smoke. Neither wraith could breach her wards. That was some relief.

Of course, her sword was outside her wards, too; her eyes darted to it, innocuous by the mosaic wall as if sitting at the end of that long pathway. It might even be within reach, if the line of salt wasn’t more solid than any stone wall in this crypt - for her just as well as the wraiths. It wouldn’t stop her hand from reaching, but once she stretched her hand over the circle, the wards would break, and the wraiths would both be on her before her hand could close over the hilt and drive them back with blade and holy power.

Or she could sit here, trapped, until she starved to death.

There had to be another way. Iswen sat back on her heels, one hand massaging her thigh, little more than pressure through the chaimail, but it helped the prickles somewhat. Next time, she vowed she would ensure she had enough salt and space for a larger circle, one where she could stand or change position if she had to. Assuming there was a next time. _Oh merciful Lord Kelemvor if you…_ she refused to complete the prayer, tightening her jaw to choke it down. Or perhaps it was just that her throat was tight with the bright, copper-blood taste of fear, until she could hardly swallow to begin with.

Paladins could not be controlled by their fears, but they felt it just the same. They - _she_ was just called to be better than trying to barter with the gods, pledging faith and good behavior for a blessing. That wasn’t the point of either.

But she would very gladly take any help in getting out of this mess.

The flagstones warmed under her hand. For a thundering two heartbeats, she thought it was just her own body warmth, the contrast against the icy wraiths and the somber dead. Then the wraiths hissed and quivered, rushing back from her, swirling around each other; the floor gently pulsed under her touch, like its own heartbeat. “What—”

— _the Nine fucking Hells_ died on her lips when she looked up, and the mosaic wall was shimmering, like the heat that rose of the Calim desert. But that was impossible: it had to be. Iswen forgot about the wraiths, had to simply blink several times.

The wall _rippled_ , a stone thrown into a pool’s reflection, even as her senses insisted it was a solid wall. An illusion?

Then the drow stumbled out of the wall from nowhere, landed hard on his knees, and he was no illusion: to the same senses that told her the ruins were evil and the wraiths were dead, he sang with life.

She’d just last seen him _dead,_ trapped in that horrible gray room with nothing but his anger and pride and sharp-edged tongue. _Zaknafein,_ the name so unwillingly dragged from his lips that perhaps it was even his.

The wraiths hissed gleefully, and from their hovering arms grew claws, intent gleaming in their red eyes. Did they know him? Was he one of the ones who had escaped what had trapped them? Or did they just hate that he was here and alive?

It didn’t matter. There was no choice. Maybe it was cleaner that way, no room for fear or dread.

Iswen lunged across her circle, the wards passing over her skin like the tickle of cut ropes, diving for her sword. Unfortunately, he was half on top of it. She’d apologize later; she ducked her shoulder, used momentum and chainmail, and when she crashed into him and the now-solid wall, made sure she ended up beneath him.

Her fingers closed around the hilt of her sword, and that was all that mattered.

The wraiths surged forward, and with a scrape of metal against the stone floor, she got her sword out from underneath them and shoved it up, fingers finding the embossed arm-and-scales on the crosshilt. Somewhere beneath her anger, there was still pity that this was not who the lovers had truly been. But mostly, she refused to let them kill the drow or her. “ _Begone_ ,” she snarled, and shoved the the wrath of Kelemvor against them.

The wraiths hissed, sharp with fear, twisted and twined around each other as they tried to flee, but there was nowhere to go. The surge of power didn’t stop them like the shield of her wards. It struck like a sword. A flash of gray light cut through the shadows, flared around each of the coffins in their maze, and this time the hiss was higher, smoke curling that was as if a candle had trailed over moldy curtains.

Trailing smoke and shadows, the larger wraith, the one that had been the strong village boy, lashed an arm ending in claws at her; no matter she _knew_ he didn’t have the range Iswen reflexively tried the parry, no more than an awkward bat of her sword as she tried to gain her feet, chainmail scraping on the stone. The drow - _Zaknafein_ \- was heavy on her back, and if he’d been stunned by her blow, came to his senses now, shoving back at her, hissing something that sounded too much like the wraiths, and pained on top of that.

Iswen planted the tip of her sword on the floor, hauled herself up, shaking her way free of the tangle, and whipped a quick slash for the female who’d circled to flank them; the wraith fell back, cautious if not hurt. “Are you alright?” she asked over her shoulder.

“ _Nindol k’lar zhah vel’bol?_ ” he said. Or she thought he said; it was something that was both liquid and sharp, ice moving through a river, and utterly incomprehensible, no matter that she’d been able to understand him just fine before. But then, she’d also been a spirit, and he’d been the next thing to one: they hadn’t actually been speaking physically.

“Well, shit,” Iswen muttered, and stabbed the wraith again, drove her back a few more steps. But there was more than one wraith this time; she whirled and the half-forgotten pain in her leg flared and stabbed, turned her graceful advance into something more than half a limp, but her hands were sure on her sword, swiping up a high guard against the claws that would be descending on her…

But Zaknafein had gotten there first, and she had no idea how he’d gotten the sword in his hands, but the blade was as alive as he was, bright silver carving arcs through the darkness. The wraith lunged, then was forced to fall back into itself, screeching, as the blade carved off both of its arms with what Iswen swore was one strike: it was too fast and fluid to be two. The drow glanced at her, and his sword slashed, half an attack and half a gesture to both wraiths, his arched eyebrow a question.

She’d asked for help. Who was she to argue if the gods had decided to send her a drow weaponsmaster instead of holy fire? Iswen nodded, pivoted, and it was a mercy to be able to set her bad leg towards the wall, rock her weight off it, and not think of anything more than defending. She slashed for the other wraith, protecting his flank, just as he protected hers. It wouldn’t work for long; if her first strike had hurt them, it was wariness that kept them back now. But it gave them a little time, a little space, for her to come up with some kind of strategy that would get both of them out of this crypt, out of the ruined castle so that she could come back with enough paladins and priests to cleanse every last inch of this place.

Except it seemed Zaknafein had different opinions on the matter. He snarled something, words she didn’t even try to follow, and advanced; Iswen yelped as she stumbled backwards, forced to follow him even as a quick low cut blocked the female wraith’s dart at his exposed side. Behind her, she heard the other wraith snarl something as incompressible as the drow’s words, and guessed what had just happened. She muttered, “Attacking him isn’t going to help.” If her steel blade couldn’t do a damn thing against the wraiths, she couldn’t imagine that his would be any better.

She guessed wrong. The wraith hissed again, sharper, enough that she risked the glance over her shoulder. Zaknafein was recovering from a lunge, smoothly collecting himself in a way she’d envy even when her leg healed, weaving around a black splotch on the floor. Something blacker than the shadows dripped down from the wraith, added another patch to avoid on the cobblestones. Iswen’s eyes flicked up, met red ones, and Zaknafein lifted a shoulder in what could only be a wry shrug: _well, that actually worked._

Alright then, that _had_ actually helped. She twisted her grip on her sword, settled it so that her fingers could reach for the sigil on the crosspiece, and swept the sword in a low guard, nodding to Zaknafein. He glanced between her and her sword, white eyebrows drawn sharply together, and then he nodded slowly.

She had a moment’s breathless prayer he understood what she wanted of him, but then he was moving, striking at the wraith’s side, slicing the claws that lashed out at them both. The wraith screeched - Iswen rocked back with a sweeping high guard, blocked the female who would have rushed them both, and turned back in time to set herself and pull the divine strength into her sword again.

Trying to flee the drow, the wraith impaled itself on her blade. It wasn’t ever like killing a human; there was no flesh to slow the sword, no bone to trap the edge. At best, it was like dragging her blade through water, resistance, but nothing that would actually stop her. She cut upwards, and the wraith slowed, more fluid gushing down from its form: it was close enough she watched the burning red coals of its eyes flicker as it died. Then it dissolved, a rush of liquid and air that was almost a sigh, and it was gone.

Did it know? Could it still sense pain and rushing death? Or was this something else, a freedom from a cursed existence? She was never sure how much wraiths - or any undead thing that was formed after the soul itself was gone - really felt.

The female clearly felt enough. It shrieked again, outrage and grief, and rushed forward, tearing the shadows with her in her wake like a widow’s black cloak. Zaknafein snarled on a pivot, slashed high with his sword, and Iswen brought her sword up, flatly vertical. She pressed her fingers to the sigil, and felt her temples throb. _Once more_ , she told herself as she stretched her senses, her will, reached for the power that had to be there.

What had come so easily into her hand before was slow and sluggish now, its edged rimmed with pain: the gods frowned on those who poured out their divine power carelessly, recklessly. Iswen gritted her teeth with effort and pain. _Once more - please, if not we’re dead_.

She breathed out a breath that trembled as much as her leg, and with it, divine grace pulsed out from her crosspiece. It wasn’t nearly as strong as the first time she’d struck out with it, but it was enough. Enough, with Zaknafein stalking gracefully around the splattered remains of the other wraith, for the other one to draw up sharply, and then retreat into the shadows with a rush of wind.

“That’s going to be a problem,” Iswen said, lowering her sword as she scanned the rest of the graves: she knew well enough that the moment she thought herself safe, something else would shove the top off the coffin and drag itself towards the living. From the way he paced back towards her, sword in a low guard and eyes shifting from wall to wall, Zaknafein felt the same way.

But silence settled back over the crypt like the dust they had stirred up in the fight, and Iswen dared to lower her sword - even if she didn’t dare sheathe it yet - and breathed out a long breath. It seemed they would be granted a measure of grace and time.

Time enough, at least, for her to finally question what had just happened: _how had a dead drow come here?_ Just what _was_ this place?

She reached back and set her hand on the wall. Mosaic tile met her fingertips; if it had been a portal, it was closed now. She pulled back, looking up at the curved arch again: it might be closed, but she also wasn’t fool enough to trust magic that had spat someone out at her feet for no good reason. But it’s secrets would have to remain its own, for now. _One more problem for another time_. She was nearly becoming used to it.

Zaknafein followed her gaze, head tipping back as he looked over the wall for the first time, frowning. “ _Sarn velkyn faerbol,”_ he muttered, and from the way his mouth tugged, it might have been a proverb instead of a comment. He sighed, and looked back to her, still with that considering expression. “ _Yathrin?”_ he asked, gesturing to her.

“I have absolutely no idea what that means,” she said.

Some of her meaning must have been clear enough, perhaps especially as it was flatly stating the obvious. He shook his head and stepped closer, reached out and tapped the crosspiece of her sword, the circle stamped with Kelemvor’s holy symbol. His fingers moved out, wiggling to suggest sparks or…

“Priestess?” she said. She set her sword against the wall, staring at the mosaics, daring them to take it away, then pressed her hands together in mimed prayer, raised open hands to the heavens to worship or call down holy fire, cocking her head towards him until he nodded. “Me,” she placed her hand on her chest, “No,” she said, shaking her head for emphasis.

Zaknafein gave her a look that was almost comically incredulous, and pointed at the black stain on the floor, all that was left of the wraith he’d helped her kill.

“Paladin,” she said. She picked up her sword again, tapped the holy symbol, and traced her fingers down the blade. Then she stabbed down into the mess that remained.

Zaknafein frowned. _“Sargtlin?”_ he said. He tapped the center of his chest, then repeated the word as he twisted the blade in his hand in a casual salute before sheathing it and resting a hand on the hilt, a gesture so casually familiar she did understand.

“Warrior, yes,” she said, sheathed her own sword so she could match his gesture: a warrior like him. All arguments and discussions over the difference between paladins and priests came down to that point: a paladin was first and foremost a warrior.

And he, another warrior, should have had as much trouble with the wraith as she had. “How…?” she asked, then went over and unsheathed her sword to stab it into the wraith-remnants, pointing to his.

He frowned, and his hand closed a little more protectively over the hilt - not quite as though he meant to draw it, but certainly as though he wasn’t going to let her do so, either.

Iswen rubbed at her forehead. The pressure through her gauntlet wasn’t quite enough to soothe the threatening headache, though it did make her feel better just on principle. As horrible as that place had been, at least they’d been able to communicate in it. Now all the questions she wanted to ask him - _how are you here, why are you here, how did you hurt them, shouldn’t you still be dead? -_ stumbled on her tongue. Priests and mages had spells that would translate languages, but as she’d told him, she was a paladin. She’d just have to make do with gestures and hope, and leave the metaphysics for _after_ they were safe back in the chapter house.

Which was not unlike what she did most days, come to think of it.

“Come on,” she said, beckoning as she started through the tangle of coffins, and apparently the gesture was universal or at least understandable for drow as well as for her ball of light; the shadows bobbed as her ball of light came back to her shoulder, enough that she shot a glance over her shoulder at the sound of a faint scuff. Not a zombie, which was a mercy, and Zaknafein was at least following on her heels. He was just closer than she expected, given the sound. He raised an eyebrow and looked entirely too innocent to be unaware of what he’d done.

On the other hand, maybe she would be far happier not knowing what was going to come out of his mouth.


	6. Chapter 6

In the cloak of shadows following the priestess - no, the _paladin_ , a word that seemed to mean some kind of priestess who fought with a sword, though to his mind she had been far too insistent on the distinction - Zak scanned the long room of untidy coffins he’d fallen into. It could have been any drow crypt: stone flag walls, low ceiling, cool air. But there wasn’t nearly the weight overhead he half-expected. He wasn’t altogether sure why: Doomguide had been human, and so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to follow her to somewhere near the surface. It was honestly far more likely than her standing in front of that pool of acid in the Underdark, anyways.

He kept rolling the thought in his mind, trying to make it more comfortable, but it lingered, an itch between his shoulder blades that he’d never be able to scratch and would only look foolish in the trying.

It was far better - certainly more pleasing - to consider Doomguide herself, anyways. Human, to be sure, which meant he wasn’t sure if she was tall for her kind or not; certainly she was taller than Malice, almost of a height with him. She moved with a satisfying grace, her steps noisier than his but sure of where they were falling, the faint hitch in her stride not slowing her overmuch - a new wound, not general awkwardness. She was nowhere near wary enough to be a product of Melee-Magthere or Arach-Tinilith, had never patrolled in the Underdark, but even in the quiet of the chamber, there was a readiness in her shoulders as her gray eyes swept the shadows of the room, watching the tombs, chainmail shirt comfortable over her shoulders and hand set on her sword.

Yes, she might not have the arched beauty of his kind, but there was much to admire in her form, regardless. With her broad mouth and subtle curves beneath the armor, he also doubted he’d suffer when she ordered him into her bed. Though how she was going to do that without a common language between them didn’t bear contemplating; Malice had been fond of snapping her fingers and pointing towards her bed, even though they _had_ spoken the same language.

A problem for another time. To his faint surprise - and from how her hand tightened on her sword hilt, hers as well - they reached the end of the crypt without anything else swooping through the walls or rising up from their coffins to stop them. Doomguide reached for the crooked door, then turned in her tracks and looked over the crypt again, frowning. Not the way a priestess normally did: not with that dangerous edge of displeasure that was one short step away from fury. In the shadows, her gray eyes were the brightest part of the room, catching and holding her light, and they were…He struggled for the emotion that he wasn’t sure Ilythiiri had a word for. She was unhappy with the situation, but without the usual implied edge beneath it that meant blame was going to be assigned.

She spoke quietly, rapidly, and not to him at all. Unbidden, he thought of her words to him in that gray chamber, when they actually could speak to each other: _you’re dead, and you’re not where you’re supposed to be_.

Doomguide. He’d thought her a guide to the doomed, thought her his own personal guide. Perhaps she was one after all, just for all the dead instead of only him, and no spirit herself. A small blade twisted under his belly, a cut at his arrogance that he was not special to her in that regard, either.

Foolish. As foolish as expecting her to have come to the Underdark instead of him dropped somewhere on the surface - or so near to it that this underground chamber hardly counted. He’d only ever been a fool about some things, and never priestesses. This simply wasn’t the usual way they’d dashed his hopes, and he always had his work.

Zaknafein slipped past her, stood in the threshold of the door, and found himself absurdly grateful it was the sort that didn’t bite, didn’t do anything more than softly groan as he eased it open: deadly under the wrong circumstances, but at least not magic. He breathed in faded dust, lingering traces of fallen spiderwebs and limestone, and studied the passage in front of him and the passage running off to his right. Twenty yards down, both turned sharply into deeper shadows, subtly towards each other in such a way that he got the sense they were the same passage, running in a square.

Not large, as such things were: the entire complex could be fitted within the outer walls of House Do’Urden, with room enough left over for the chapel to Lolth and his set of rooms. But, that meant it was still large enough to hold a full patrol of drow, a high priestess and her retinue, or any number of wraiths, hidden in any number of chambers connected to it, or deeper passages branching from it.

But at least they wouldn’t have physical undead to worry about at their back, and he was used to claiming small blessings.

Doomguide cleared her throat behind him, and he shifted to the side, a little farther down the right-hand passage to let her through. She strode past him, forward, and as the choice was a priestess’s right, he turned his attention to the one before him. It would run down the length of the room they had just come from, by his mental map, and he paced off the distance, eyes for the stone walls on either side, for the return of the wraith.

His left hip felt empty, the lack of weight of a matched scabbard or even a whip coiled on his belt or in the small of his back. He compensated, as much a mental adjustment to the battles to come than shifting his weight so he didn’t try to limp as much as Doomguide. That he had one sword was enough; closing his hand over the hilt, power hummed through his palm and up his arm, and whatever unknown enchantments had been laid on it, that it could hurt the wraiths was another small blessing he would not question too closely.

“Zaknafein!”

He turned at the hiss, arched an eyebrow towards the priestess that she might even have been able to see across the distance, just as he could clearly see her scowl. A record, even for him, for treading on a priestess’s toes. She beckoned him closer, and expecting the whip bite with every step, he returned to the turn in the corridor.

But once he drew close enough, she told him something, rapidly enough he wasn’t sure he was expected to understand her words, just have them as a backdrop for her gestures: her fingers wagged between the two of them, a connection, and then she pointed towards the passage in front of her.

Zak frowned; she had proved she was more than capable of watching her own back, but if she wanted him with her, that too was her right to decide, and admittedly had some sense behind it, given the wraith that was hunting them. He nodded, short as any he’d ever given to a priestess, and since she had opinions on where they were supposed to be going, he fell in at her flank to let her have the danger of walking point.

It was strangely comfortable, pacing in the shadows at her back beyond the reach of her light, senses honed more on what was behind them than what they were walking towards. But of course, behind the priestesses would have been his place anyways, when he wasn’t walking point; it shouldn’t be a surprise.

But this wasn’t normal, no matter how it felt around his skin. He caught a glimpse of a fresco along the right-side wall, a crude thing even aside from the dust and chipped tiles, but the subject of demonic adoration at least would have been at home in any great hall in Menzoberranzan. On the left-side, a little antechamber bumped out from the hallway; when Doomguide turned towards it, the light going with her, he nearly sighed in relief as slightly darker shadows swept over him, and looked forward, to where the hallway turned away.

However comfortable being in her shadow was, he was always happier scouting ahead; let the priestess deal with whatever religious implications of the fresco, and he would admit that she specifically was quite adept at handling dark magic. He’d bring her back a report on what they faced ahead like a good drow soldier. Though how he was to do that was another problem entirely; perhaps he could cobble together something of the patrol’s handcode—

“Zaknafein!”

He was becoming tired of hearing her hiss his name just when he was halfway to a turn in the corridor. But, rolling his eyes, he turned back. He just also didn’t bother moving a step closer to her, not when they could see each other perfectly well, well enough for him to sharply gesture, open palmed, at the corridor and at her, all the frustration and temper on his face to add expletives to the silent “ _What?”_

She was scowling, and something more than that, face drawn with lines that made her seem older, eternal in the stark light from her little globe. She jabbed a finger at the antechamber, and then swept two fingers up, towards and - through? - the ceiling, lips forming two words he wouldn’t understand for emphasis.

Up. Up and beyond. Leaving? _“No.”_ It was his turn to hiss something, knowing she wouldn’t understand it, the words pulled from his mouth right along with the sharp gestures deeper into the passage: “You are not nearly such a coward or a fool to think to leave an enemy at your back.” One hand on the hilt of his sword, he drew a line across his throat, because that was likely the same in every language, and hooked a thumb back deeper into the complex for his opinion on the matter.

In his life, he’d found going forward and killing things solved nearly every problem.

As near as he could tell at the distance, she was chewing on her tongue as she stared at him. Then she let out a breath he heard even across the distance, shoulders straightening, and visibly gave up on whatever complicated reasoning she had tried to figure out how to sign at him. She crooked her fingers in a too-familiar gesture, and pointed insistently up at the ceiling.

But this time, he had a choice in obeying a priestess’s orders. “No,” he repeated, and punctuated it with a crude gesture from the Braeryn that actually seemed to translate across languages as well, from how her eyebrows shot up. He didn’t wait to see how, exactly, she’d lose her temper over it, just turned on his heel and stalked deeper into the shadows.

His answer came moments later, with an explosive word that could only be a curse. And then her footsteps sounded behind him, not swift to chase him down, but the same wary pace as when she’d stalked through the crypt.

Good. Under the proud defiance heating his skin, he felt a cold line of relief run down his spine. He’d seen his new sword hurt a wraith, but he was much happier having the priestess who’d killed it at his back. And even aside from the tactics, knowing that she would come after him to fight at his back rather than take a whip to him made the stones feel a little more solid under his feet, the world a little less sharp.

He made the turn in the corridor before she did, and Zaknafein relished the darkness, felt what was likely a budding headache retreat from his temples. He could fight in blinding light; it was just easier when he didn’t need to. He darted farther down the corridor, bare feet skimming over the edges of the solid flags, the centers a little dipped, almost oiled smooth with the passage of feet, so familiar he almost shuddered, almost expected to press open the first door on the left and find his own armory beyond.

As it was, the boxes were nearly a mirror for the sacks of a drow storage room, except… He took a sniff: stale air, dust, something that wasn’t quite the rich earthy musk of mushroom, and something that coating the back of his throat, made his mouth twitch. “Dead spiders,” he said with caustic pleasure.

Doomguide made a polite noise, and when he looked at her, she was studying him with patience interest, except for the fingers that tapped up and down the hilt of her sword.

Apparently humans were not quite so familiar with the scent of abandoned spiderwebs: something like, but not, dust and mourning. For a moment, he thought that might actually be a blessing, and of course one he would never have. Shaking his head, he gestured at the room, and made a firm slash of his hand over it: nothing here. A crook of his finger, a signal as much as the turn of his back: move on.

The next door was only steps farther down the corridor, still on the left-hand side. He gave it a light push, and somehow still could be surprised when the door only rattled a little, locked, and perhaps magically at that - he had no way to tell. He glanced over his shoulder at Doomguide, and with a shrug, gestured to the door, backing away.

Her eyes narrowed as she studied the door, instead of sensibly following him away from something they couldn’t open and would likely bite them if they could. He’d seen priestesses with that look whip the first male who crossed their path. Prudently, he took another step back before daring to use her name. “Doomguide?”

She ignored him. She ignored him in favor of rearing back and kicking the door, heel first.

In the silence of the corridor, the crack and groan of the door shaking in its frame was louder than a battle. “Young idiot,” he snarled at her, whirling to check their back. “Do you wish the wraith back down on us?”

She snarled back, and kicked the door again. This time, splinters and cracks spread from the lock, and with a grunt, she kicked it one last time. The door groaned and sagged, and she stepped forward and pressed her shoulder against it, shifting until she felt something that satisfied her, and then with one last shove, had the door open.

In spite of himself, he arched an eyebrow, mildly impressed: he wasn’t sure he could have done that with three kicks, and with at least some kind of wound to her leg as well. _Strong, even for a female_. And she’d yet to turn that strength against him with anything more than sharp words that quite literally meant nothing. This time, he was fairly sure it was lust that traced a finger down his spine. “Satisfied?” he drawled.

Over her shoulder, she snapped something at him, but with a fierce smile as she stepped into the room - and nearly as quickly backed out of it, the warmth gone from her cheeks, something like his own ashen undertones in her skin. She closed her eyes, huffed another breath that he could hear, and entered slower.

After that reaction he really had to see for himself, even if it meant abandoning the watch post. Stepping past the mess she’d made of the door, he caught only a brief glimpse of bookcases at the far end of the room, the sort that wizards liked, with alternating shelves for books and diamond caches for scrolls, saw without truly seeing the long counters that ran along the walls with a careful sort of clutter of bottles and bowls. A workroom, then.

And this workroom naturally was dominated by the worktable that would not be out of place in a chapel of Lolth: solid, practical beaten metal, probably more legs than it needed just so that it resembled nothing more than a great spider. Manacles on each of the corners, the chains still and perfect as if they could be innocent; there was never anything innocent about a worktable like this, not with channels cut down the side to drain blood and the handy little bar at knee-height to hold tools.

He didn’t need to stare at it, but couldn’t seem to stop himself. _The press of cold stone against his back. Ropes tightening down on his wrists. The crack and heat-flash of pain from Vierna’s slap—_

Zaknafein shoved the memories aside, ruthlessly cut them down when they tried to play in front of his eyes: it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the same, and even if it was, he would not have that memory on his tongue. Not here. Not now.

Not when Doomguide stood at the head of it, stiff-shouldered, hand not on her sword but rather reaching out to set light fingers onto the table, daring to touch a darker smudge - probably blood, possibly something worse than blood. She looked up at him, and if there was softness in her eyes, there was also the bright gleam of fury. She said something very carefully, firm words that needed no translation at all.

He inclined his head, hand on his heart and hand on his swordhilt, giving her his service. “Yes, let’s kill them all,” he said.


	7. Chapter 7

Out in the hallway, Zaknafein looked to the nearer corner, and held up a hand to stop Doomguide before she could get too close with her light. He eased a few steps away from her, deeper into the hallway, minding how close he was to the wall, to the corner. He cocked his head, listening and waiting, checking they were still undisturbed, even after the noise of kicking down the door. In the Underdark, the only time when things were this quiet was when something worse was prowling the passages. Or nothing; that was always the trick, to know when a cavern was quiet because it was the lair of something that could swallow a drow whole, and when it was quiet because it was a underground cave where nothing could live.

Small wonder his people were paranoid; the betrayal and kinslaying were just hobbies in comparison to the rest of their surroundings.

There was, of course, one trick open to him - to most of the creatures in the Underdark. He closed his eyes, and shifted his vision to the infraspectrum, and the black world turned into whorls of color: the whorl of red and orange of life just at his back glowed like faerie fire against the cool blue of the stones. Everything held some heat, even things like the walls and floor.

Everything, except the dead. The magic that made the dead walk was colder than honest stone - who knew that better than him?

Zak swallowed down the bitter metallic taste - full of the high notes of steel, not the copper of blood - at the back of his throat. He could not remember. It went beyond needing to preserve the patches of sanity, of _self_ , that he’d been allowed at that time; if he remembered now, let himself linger on what he’d been, he would get both of them killed. It was enough he knew it as a weaponsmaster knew a common type of fodder among drow Houses. If he’d never directly hunted a wraith before, well, that’s what the priestess at his back was for.

Right now, he looked through the swirls of color for something colder than the stones, something that dragged warm life towards it, devouring what it no longer was.

A patch of blackness, in the middle of the corridor ahead of them. He was moving, striking with a bold slash, before he could finish blinking away the infravision which was so useful at everything except judging distances and vulnerabilities in battle.

Metal rang against stone, vibrations that shivered up his arm before the echoes came back to his ears. Aching, he retreated a step, and his vision finally cleared enough: he’d struck nothing but the stone wall, just as if he was back in the gray room, trapped behind doors. The wall wasn’t even chipped, and he had a moment where the world seemed to move sickly under his feet.

He’d left that place. He _had_ to have left that place. He was not simply tossed into a new trap for the spot of whatever controlled him.

He looked again, letting his eyes shift slower from visual to infravision, watching the colors bleed over the forms. And yes, there was a solid block of black in the wall, like a chunk of obsidian in the limestone - and impossible as that formation. If it hadn’t been quite so dark, he might have been able to tell himself that it was just a different sort of stone, one that held heat differently, naturally colder than its surroundings. But it _radiated_ cold, and something else, that metallic taste.

Doomguide made a noise behind him, soft enough but carrying in the quiet of the corridor; her orange glow of warmth and her ball of light were still back around the corner, out of his way. He gestured for her to come ahead, eyes shifting back to the less uncomfortable option when she did. But when she approached with sword warily drawn, looking both at him and the corridor, brow furrowed, it was his turn to be at a loss for how to translate something very complicated when she couldn’t even follow the drow hand code, much less his tongue.

For the first time in all four centuries of his life, he could not wait to find a priestess or a mage - either of them, or he would accept both, whichever, so long as they had a spell to translate languages.

But until then, he would make do.

Zak stepped closer to her, seized her by the wrist, and over the squawked protest, towed her over to the wall and pressed her hand against the stone. She blinked, sword lowering, mouth closing and firming into a grim line as she looked up towards the ceiling; tugging herself free, she kept her palm on the wall as she paced away from him, tracking the extent of the cold patch.

He had to smile: perhaps they wouldn’t need a spell after all.

She said something - he thought he recognized an expletive - as she came back to him, shaking her head. With her sword, she gestured to the wall, quick, firm lines up to the ceiling, over, and back down. Then she made a twisting gesture at about chest-level that had his eyebrows winging up and a slow smirk tugging at his lips. Before he could even open his mouth, she told him something sharp and made sure he understood by stabbing up the crude gesture _he_ had used.

He almost laughed. Too close to the surface, a stranger at his hip, hunted by wraiths, questions as to how he could be alive tickling in the back of his mind, and he almost could laugh. Not quite at her, but because she was the least proper priestess he had ever met or even heard of, a fierce thing too bold for shadows or masks or plots or assassinations, who still held back the sharp edges of her temper for those who meant to kill her instead of those who merely annoyed her. It would have been foolishness, mere bravado, if she lacked skill with that sword. As it was, it made her very appealing.

When he spread his hands in almost submission, she rolled her eyes and gestured carefully again, sectioning off that part of the wall, and then beckoning it forward. “Door,” he realized. He ran a hand over the stone wall, tracing his fingertips along the divots of mortar and pressing his palm over the solid blocks. “There should be a catch somewhere, if it’s a door,” he remarked, and from the way she crouched to check a little farther down on the wall, she agreed.

But if it was less smooth than the perfect stones of the place that had trapped him, he also couldn’t feel the crack where _wall_ became _door. “Magic_ door,” he said, stepping back to survey it. A frustrated sigh that was probably agreement, and Doomguide stood, absently dusting off her palm as she stepped back and scowled at the door.

Looking between her and the magic door, and thinking about just how he’d come to this place, Zak lifted his sword. Striking it with the blade had done no good, so perhaps… He tipped it carefully to keep from scraping it over the ceiling, and brought the pommel towards the wall.

The hilt shivered in his hand, the pommel warming as quivering vibrations ran down from the tip and up through his arm as if a lodestone tugged at the blade; he kept a grip on it, but let the blade dip and follow whatever it was that pulled it. The blade went flat, pulled forward and would have flown from his hand if he hadn’t stepped, let it guide him those few steps across the corridor. The tip moved in a little circle, parrying, and when it stilled, on instinct he placed it against the wall.

Stone ground on stone, a deeper groan somewhere in the wall, and Doomguide yelped, suddenly at his side and pushing at the wall. He moved the blade just in time as the stones slipped aside, and air whooshed and gasped as it flooded into an opened chamber; when Doomguide would have followed it, he caught her and pushed her back, retreating a step.

There was a square gap in the wall with plumes of dust swirling at knee-height, and the light at her shoulder cascaded in and played over forms that seemed to be chairs and a desk and more bookcases - but that didn’t make it safe. He drew in a deep breath, testing the air: not that some poisons weren’t undetectable once released into the air, or tasted only of the dust. But he thought that if he started convulsing the priestess would get the idea.

Stale dust. More dead spiders. A hint of something else, something that tickled the back of his throat - perhaps faded smoke? Incense? And something beneath those, something…

Malice. His stomach turned over, and he nearly dragged Doomguide back another step, his hand closing onto her black hauberk. Whatever was in there, whatever strange combination of scents, it made him think of _Matron Malice Do’Urden,_ all spidersilk and female musk and sometimes the bitter tang of whatever potion she’d been brewing before she’d summoned him.

No. This place was real. This place was real, and if he’d been dead, he was damn well sure she had been dead as well; he hadn’t been sane, hadn’t had control of his own mind, and that meant he had _felt_ her die when he did. This was not Malice’s place.

“Zaknafein?”

This time, she said his name so gently it was almost worse than being snapped at. He opened his eyes - when had he closed them? - and looked into gray eyes that were steady and somehow larger. She said something that rolled and rippled, and it didn’t need to be loud or in a language that he understood to caress his skin with the sound alone, so wildly different from anything else in his life it had to be real. Then she reached up and tapped the back of his hand, still clenched on her hauberk; her broad mouth tugged, almost a smile, if her eyes weren’t fixed on his.

“It’s safe,” he said, forced his hand open to let her go as he strode forward, crushed his cowardice under his heel as he stepped into the room, forced himself to pace a full circle around the room to take a slow study and inventory of the square chamber, tallied all the ways that it was not a dressing chamber in the Ninth House of Menzoberranzan, besides the fact that he was allowed a shirt and trousers as well as a sword in hand.

It wasn’t nearly as plush and comfortable as a drow wizard’s study would be, though it didn’t lack for worktables - scattered with books and loose pages and dusty flasks and bright quills that wouldn’t have been out of place in Jarlaxle’s hat - and bookcases. At the far end, a faded rug spread over the stone flags offered some warmth, some color for the pair of armchairs, angled towards each other for comfortable conspiring; there was even still a wine bottle, dusty as the flasks, on the small table between them.

Harmless. He drew in several breaths; the scent of dust and parchment remained, but the smoke-traces of incense were different, dull moss-scented instead of sharply spiced. And if it still was what was left of the alchemy they’d toyed with, it was harmless enough. Well, perhaps not if the occupants had any sense and had left magical traps and wards in the floor and certainly on the books, but it wasn’t the room of his memories - all curved walls draped in equal amounts of spidersilk and spiderwebs, noisy with bubbling and grinding, too warm and too humid.

Something tapped behind him. He whirled, scowled at Doomguide; she’d joined him on the threshold of the room, and was absently tapping her sword point against the floor as she gave the room the same survey he had. His palm itched to swat her upside the head, the way he would any student who used their weapon as a _walking stick_ , but if she wasn’t his mistress, nor was he her master. Still, she may have caught a sense of his irritation; she glanced over at him, eyebrows arched, then deliberately sheathed her sword and turned to inspect the false wall that had tucked itself just inside the chamber.

If they were lucky, it would keep out the wraith; if not, it still might hide them well enough, for long enough. He very pointedly sheathed his sword as he stalked over to the largest workbench - more a writing desk, from the number of papers on it - and glanced over the papers. The handwriting was dense; he wasn’t sure he’d be able to make out words even if he knew the language. Then again, he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to read it even if it had been a drow wizard’s notes; the pages, where not full of perfectly even lines of words, were filled with symbols he only knew were magical from the six months at the end of his last year in Melee Magthere, when all the students went to Sorcere for an overview of the magic arts.

As that was better than three hundred years ago, he had only vague memories of a thin-boned, sneering apprentice wizard, taunting him; he’d broken the boy’s wrist, suffered the punishment and sneers of the boy’s master for being a hulking brute only good with his fists, and hadn’t considered magic any farther than that: what he needed to know to kill a wizard.

Zak shifted through the pages on the desk, all those strange symbols he couldn’t read, in a language he couldn’t read, and tried to find something that would tell him how to kill these people more than they already were, how to destroy what they had created. More papers hissed on each other, sliding off into other untidy piles, revealing a leather-bound book - hand-bound by the writer, even he could tell that much in the thin leather and un-tooled cover. Not a spellbook, though, far too slender and fragile for that.

He flipped open the cover; more cryptic lines, and why, exactly, was he surprised at that? He paged through without much hope any part of it would make sense…and then the covers fell open to a page that _did_.

Skin cold, he marked the page, then scooped up the book and turned. A grinding of stone on stone, and Doomguide finished sliding the door closed; that long moment while the echoes faded, she leaned against it, shoulders slumped and hands braced on stone they both knew wasn’t solid enough.

He whistled, and didn’t wait for her to turn before he tossed the book at her - well, not quite her head, but not far beneath it, either. He did have some manners. However tired and broken she looked, she whirled, hand shooting up in the air. The leather thudded neatly into her hand, but she only frowned at him as she weighed it; he didn’t need a language in common with her to get her to do what he wanted, just gestured for her to open it.

Still frowning, she turned her eyes down at the book, then did as he’d gestured and opened it and started to page through. He saw the moment she found the page he’d marked: she went still, and lifted those shadowed gray eyes up to him, terrible knowledge in them even as her fingertips grazing over the page and the ink.

Over the page with the sketch of the circular chamber with five alcoves bubbled off one end. The chamber he’d been trapped in.


	8. Chapter 8

It made a twisted, horrible kind of sense.

Iswen paced - fine, mostly limped - back and forth in the priest’s chambers, looking through the personal journal of one of the dead cultists. After he’d seemed to realize that staring at her with hard red eyes wouldn’t make her puzzle through the spindly handwriting and gossipy history of the cult any faster, Zaknafein kept out of her way and contented himself with rummaging through the alchemy bench. There was something edgy, though, in the way he only used one hand to do so, the other stroking over the pommel of his sword, fingers pausing to drum over the hilt, the loudest sound she’d heard him make.

She told herself she’d worry about him after she finished worrying about the cult, but sensing him made _her_ edgy. Or perhaps that was just the content of what she was reading. She didn’t know how the demon worship tied into it, but, Nine Hells, it probably didn’t matter; either the demon had dropped hints that this was something they would find entertaining, or they’d thought this was another way to gain power over lesser demons, or…

She checked the journal again, scanning the notes. “There’s some binding rituals in here,” she murmured. “So…control of whatever the fuck?”

Zaknafein made a noise that sounded somewhat curious. She looked over, but he didn’t look up from sorting through piles of papers she knew he couldn’t read any more than he could understand what she said, but over his shoulder he motioned impatiently for her to continue.

She was tempted to throw the priest’s journal back at him. It was the headache talking, she knew. Just as she knew the twisted bar through her temples was from the earth and stone pressing down against the crown of her head, and the lingering scent of blood and decay and despairing death that all-but formed the mortar between each stone flag, coated every table and book and flask more thoroughly than the dust.

Of course, he did also contribute to the headache; rather remarkable, given every time he spoke to her all that came out was those fluid and sharp syllables. It was all in the impatient cluck of his tongue and the sharp flicks of his fingers that were entirely too deliberate.

She pushed it from her mind with a turn too-sharp; her leg stabbed with pain that she admitted was getting worse the longer she stood and fought on it, but it wasn’t as though she had the time or space to heal it. Not knowing what they were going to be facing.

“They probably weren’t going for wraiths,” she said thoughtfully, leaning on one of the tables to get the weight off her leg for a minute - there wasn’t enough holy water in the world to make her comfortable in one of the armchairs. “Wraiths are just what you get when you kill someone for a ritual that doesn’t work; even the volunteers die in despair and grief and rage.”

Not sacrifices; the journal of the self-proclaimed high priest made that abundantly clear. The _sacrifices_ had been different people altogether - the emphasis had been bitter on her tongue when she’d first read that passage. She probably should have figured that on her own, and might have gotten there in a bit more time; someone sacrificed died in torment and pain and fury, but the rage that bubbled out of them tied them to a place more specifically than what the wraiths showed. Those were ghosts or specters or the occasional iron-willed zombie, and they would tear apart any who were connected with the person or think that killed them; she’d expect to find them in that crypt or tied to wherever the altar was, not roaming free.

“I suppose, lucky as I am, we’re going to have more and worse to look forward to then,” she muttered, and rubbed at her temples, tried to chase away some of the pressure. “Until then, wraiths. How many do you have to kill to create a breeding ground for wraiths in a place this size?” She thought of the crypt, all those tombs, and the hairs that ran up her arms and back of her neck were not quite a shiver.

They’d tried, she had to give them that much; they’d very diligently, persistently experimented and documented their experiments. “Using death to fucking rip open a gate to-” she had to stop snarling long enough to flip back through the journal to find the word - “ _a nexus_.” A nexus they’d believed was connected to death, opened doors to all those places beyond death; and all they needed was to figure out the right kind of death it took to get there.

A horrible kind of sense. They had been very logical in their torture and murder, and failing had coated everything in enough despair to spawn wraiths.

And yet… “They didn’t manage it, but _you_ …” she tapped a finger towards Zaknafein, and he actually looked up, somewhat startled, as she opened the journal, showed the sketch of the chamber again, pointed at him and then tapped the image: “You were there.” Trapped. Unable to find a way out until she had said whatever words had clicked through his brain, and she still wasn’t sure that he’d meant to come here instead of a happy afterlife. But he’d been there, and she was nearly positive these demon-worshipers hadn’t summoned him.

Iswen raked a hand over her braid, looking back at the book she weighed in her free hand, all that knowledge in the spidery handwriting that she wanted nothing so much but to burn. And hadn’t the foggiest idea what it all meant.

Zaknafein cleared his throat, and when she looked back at him, he spread his hands apart, palms up, a clear gesture of ‘now what’. Or perhaps ‘and so’, being he was at least nominally an elf. Or perhaps that was all wistful thinking, she thought, that kernel of frustration throbbing away behind her ear. For all she knew for sure, he was asking if she wanted him to dismantle more of the room for his own entertainment and information.

She let out a breath, closed her eyes, and took the moment to reach beyond her: not quite under her feet or over her head but somehow both, reaching beyond this place that reeked of suffering and black grief to the cool stillness and comforting weight of a purer darkness. This place held death that perverted all intentions, killing before a full life could be lived, and it needed to be dealt with.

She’d come knowing that the lost lovers and the acolyte of Chauntea were probably dead, knowing what she’d need to do, and that hadn’t changed. She still had to kill the wraiths, kill whatever made the wraiths, so that those spirits could be laid to rest with the bodies.

She’d wished for paladins, and gotten a drow weaponsmaster. Right now, all questions of just who he was and where he’d come from and what connection he had with these people could wait. All that mattered was that he was willing to help.

Her leg felt a little steadier under her; certainly her feet did. She nodded and snapped the journal shut, tossing it roughly to the table. Beckoning to Zaknafein, she pointed at the closed door, and tapped a hand on her sword hilt. Time to go. He nodded, stalked forward with that enviable grace, steps smooth as water washing down the stones, and took a place to the side of the door, watching her expectantly.

Yes, that was the general direction, the exact location was courtesy of the same journal; the experiments and descriptions of the rituals had been interspersed with gossipy details about members. The high priest had been at least prudent enough to refer to everyone with initials or nicknames, but she didn’t really care who had been here, not this long after they were dead and gone.

She cared about the passage near the back that read: “ _The Goodsir was careless with the ritual space once again. Mayhaps he feels that as he knows all there is to be seen in his foundations, there is no need for secrecy; certainly he feels that as his servants owe him their fealty, their silence will hold fast. I, being less trusting of the self-preservation of the lesser classes - for certainly they understand that the death of their master would be their own death, either afterwards or before, should we discover their treachery - insisted he make the changes I demanded of him_ …”

Interesting as the implication was that the high priest had not been the lord of the keep, Iswen saw far more use to the careful list of measures, and through them, what they needed to drop the warded illusion protecting and hiding the door to their ritual chamber.

She crossed to the bookcase closest to the pair of armchairs, shoved the journal into a free space as she looked over the shelves. Like the journal, many of the book were leather bound, at least one of them in something she prayed was pork leather rather than human skin. Few of them had titles but she could at least pick out the letters of the ones that were in Old Thorass, and she had enough Alzhedo, the formal Calishite language, to roughly translate one as _For the Cultivation and Maintenance of Ritual Powers in the Necromantic Arts_.

“These were truly charming people,” she muttered, and spied the book she needed. It, too, was leather-bound, with heavy brass clasps tarnished to a green that was nearly gray against the still-emerald dye of the book itself, but it was the scent that confirmed it; when she pulled it down, there was just the faint whiff of sage or lavender - some green herb, anyways. If it had been a spice from saffron to pepper to nutmeg, she could have named it from the taste of a single grain, but all she knew about this one was that it was something that didn’t belong down here: it was about something that was alive.

She set the gardening book aside, and reached back along the shelf, scraping a nail down along the groove of the back panel until it caught on a tiny crack in the wood. She wiggled it, feeling the joins rock separately from the back panel, and pressed it inward. No smoke billowed out, not even an audible click, but she felt the top edge open, and when she got her fingertips onto it, the hidden cache swung open.

Even that much had something like cold slime twisting up her fingertips, a scent of rotting meat rolling out from the bookcase. Not real - not _physical_. The sense of evil was more than real enough to have bile in her throat, chest flinching back from the bookcase and taking her fingers with it.

Iswen stared at the gap, swallowed: stalling wouldn’t make the sense of malevolence any more palatable to have in her hand. Just a chunk of metal, she told herself, fingers straying for her own holy symbol on the hilt of her sword. Just a chunk of metal and some engraving. It meant nothing to her.

Except it had meant so very much to them, and so much death had been done under its aegis.

Warmth nudged her shoulder, and she opened eyes she hadn’t realized she’d closed to find Zaknafein next to her, closer than he’d yet been. He brushed shoulders with hers, and she couldn’t feel his skin, not through his shirt and her armor, but she could sense the ripple of casual strength, the firm muscle that only years of swordplay built. And this close to him, his own scent slipped under that of the dusty chamber: not just alive, but like olives, earthy, a little salty, enticing.

She stepped back. She needed the space to take a full breath for reasons far beyond the presence of what these people had hidden away, and at least now her head spun rather than her stomach.

In the space she offered, his arm darted in past the books, and he came out bouncing the round black metal symbol in his palm. With an arched eyebrow, he caught it and spun it between his fingers.

Iswen nodded, and somehow it was easier to look at the evil thing that he sent dancing over his knuckles than to look him in the eye. “That will open the door,” she said, and loosened her sword in its sheath as she turned away and beckoned him to follow.

And however he understood, even if only by the intuition of a soldier sensing a fight, he fell into step in her shadow. She could sense him there, and it felt as though he’d been there as often as her shadow.

Not alone. She drew in another deep breath, and held to that unlooked for but dearly needed boon against the darkness.


	9. Chapter 9

Iswen lead them back across the decadent workroom where wine was spilled by people who didn’t mind shedding blood, and set her shoulder against the stone wall to shove it open; her leg trembled with the effort, but more, the nape of her neck itched as the secret door rasped and groaned, unhappy to be moving back across the stone floor. 

Given the noise didn’t slow it, she rather thought it was meant to, something they had added in to add a little atmosphere as they gathered for their rituals. In a way, it was no different than the snap of a Tormtar banner in a breeze that didn’t exist, or the way a garden’s scent thickened when a Chauntean opened a gathering. Except this one made her sick, and furious.

While someone had lain in wait on their altar, sick with terror and knowing what was to come, they had taken the time to entertain themselves with delicacies and delighted in being so very clever about this crude temple.

At her side, Zaknafein tensed, like a horse collecting itself before bursting into a gallop; on her other shoulder, her light strengthened. It had been fading, and she hadn’t realized just how much until now there were sharper shadows in front of her: hers and Zaknafein’s, edges like knives slashing against the darkness.

The drow hissed through his teeth; before she could turn, he ghosted out from her side, circling her flank, and padded around the brightest part of the light for the softer edges of shadows. He used them to cross the corridor, stopping in front of the place they’d agreed had been a magic door blocked by wards no less powerful than hers.

He stepped closer to the wall, and light flared around him; not just from his hand, from the symbol of the cult, but from the sword at his hip, an ugly pulse of red from the stone that capped the hilt. It had revealed the high priest’s chambers; she hadn’t worried about it, too concerned with finding something that could open this door, but now, it was like a stone in her shoe, not quite comfortable, not quite right. _How…?_ And more importantly, _why?_

But he didn’t seem to notice, or was more concerned with what he held in his hand, and she couldn’t disagree. Light was one thing; what they were about to do was quite another.

He stared down at the token of the cult as if he could sense the oozing malevolence of it just as well as she could. He bounced it in his palm, casually enough her stomach rolled over just watching it, and waved it towards the section of the wall. 

The wall went translucent; not vanishing, not quite, the image of the wall still hazily visible. But beyond the image, their shadows leapt forward, stretching across the stone flags of a short hallways, and were swallowed up in a room that curved upward with as many shadows as the chamber Zaknafein had been trapped in. Not quite the same, or at least, she couldn’t tell if it had the same alcoves it had, if it was a conscious mimicry or if it was just the sense of the place that was the same.

Either way, from the way his eyes widened, fingers tightening on the unholy key and on the hilt of his blade, he recognized it the same instant she had. But he didn’t hesitate.

Bouncing the symbol in his palm one last time, he stuck the hand containing the symbol through the wall; it rippled, still not quite vanishing, but definitely not solid. The way these things worked, either passing the symbol through once was enough to open it for a period of time, or each cultist would need their own to pass through: Iswen racked her memory, but the book hadn’t exactly been clear on the matter. They hadn’t needed to be, when it was simply known to them.

Zaknafein drew back, considered the door and the symbol; it moved over his knuckles again, spun between his fingers. Thinking, but even knowing he was, knowing he didn’t feel the evil of the token as she did, Iswen really wished he _wouldn’t_.

He seemed to agree; he gave a small shrug, took a step back, and lightly tossed it through the wall. It passed through with the same ripple, bounced on the floor, and the quiet noise was too loud in the silence.

Her own breath was too loud, the little catch of steel as Zaknafein drew his sword was far too loud.

And there was still nothing. No lash of wards against intruders, no wail of a wraith, or even the faint gasp of wind that would mean the wraith or something worse was rushing towards them. 

“Yeah, that fucking bodes,” she muttered. 

Zaknafein slid the tip of his sword forward, and when it pierced cleanly through the wall, gave a huffed snort, glancing over his shoulder and arching an eyebrow. She tried not to be too impressed that he’d either sensed something or guessed right. What mattered was what was in front of them, and he seemed to understand that, too. His sword tip moved in a little circle, making interesting patterns of ripples through the revealed door; his _After You_ was slightly more ominous with his hilt still glowing, and the downright unnatural silence of the tomb. 

“Right,” she muttered, “Let’s end this.” Drawing her own sword, she pressed her fingers against the crosspiece’s engraved bone arm and scales, Kelemvor’s symbol, drew in a deep breath with that promise of a clean and honored death, not this twisted corruption.

And advanced through the image of the wall and through the hallway, Zaknafein at her heels.

Her light came with her, trailing at her shoulder, and for a moment, all it did was turn everything to shadows: the back of the room, the corners, even the ceiling. But that was impossible; she’d counted the steps down - well, not the exact number, but she knew how high these ceilings could be without hitting the basement above. 

But then magical lights in the room flared to life all along the perimeter - as she expected they’d been spelled to do when someone entered - and even those didn’t illuminate the ceiling above.

Instead, the magicked torchlight played over the archway fitted into the walls and ceiling across the middle of the chamber, far too familiar, too like the one Zaknafein had come out of. And over the green mist that swirled delicately up from the floor.

Another bit of magical theater, or something worse, it didn’t matter. “Oh fuck-” Her sword came up in a quick guard, and she shifted her weight off her pained leg for a lunge or hard parry. She sniffed, expecting the sharp tang of metal and bitterness of poison and decay; instead, roses bloomed under her nose, chased with the sweetness of apples. 

“Doomguide!” Zaknafein snapped. She shifted back a half-step, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw him looking up at the ceiling, backing away. 

_What…_ Her eyes tracked up, drawn to whatever unsettled someone of his clear experience. And she too could not look away.

“No!” a spectral voice cried, soft as first spring grass, and she couldn’t look to see where it was from, not when her eyes were frozen on the ceiling.

On the black, _writhing_ ceiling. On the shadows that split and forked and retreated, crawling towards the rear of the chamber, leaving behind stone in their wake.

Those weren’t shadows created from light. Or anything alive.

The curve of the arch rippled with red light, racing up from the floor and back down, and cryptic, mystical runes blazing once in midair before fading into winks of colorful lights in midair, like starbursts across her eyes from a hard blow. Before they completely faded, she recognized some of them - not enough she could have drawn them herself, but she knew damn well she’d just been looking at some of them in the priest’s journal.

Binding. Binding a demon or a portal, she had thought, but this--

Behind the arch, behind that wall of wards, the shadows gathered, swirling at the floor and rippling up. It filled the back wall with dense black tendrils of shadows, drifting and waving in a breeze that wasn’t there.

And red lights gleamed against the blackness somewhere up near the ceiling, in the head of the monstrosity.

Not a wraith. Something worse. It pulsed cold and evil, not death but the promise of something so very much worse.

The promise that it would take a death and spin that pain and fear into a child of itself. The way it had done to the lovers. 

And one of the shadows - terribly familiar - darted out to pace just behind the line of wards, evidence of just how effective that promise was.

“Shit, shit shit,” Iswen hissed under her breath as she brought her sword up, and it may as well have been a prayer. At her side, she caught the gleam of the eerie red light as Zaknafein nodded, shifting into position at her flank, sword up in a wary guard. Though what swords could do against that thing, she couldn’t know. At least it, unlike the wraith, seemed more trapped by the wards.

“I told you,” the soft voice said mournfully. From in front of her, and not from the wraith of the village girl or the Overwraith. Her eyes snapped down from the unseeing eyes of the Overwraith, focused on the shimmer of green in the air on this side of the wards.

The green light flared, and there was a sad-eyed figure in front of her, no more solid than the red ruins, but bright enough to shine against the shadows. It was difficult to tell, with the green light that formed him, but taking in the robe that fell heavily from his thin shoulders, the deep and sad eyes in a narrow and pretty face - the way Zaknafein hissed something she really didn’t want translated - she thought she knew him. “You were Mistress Belia’s acolyte.”

The half-elf looked no better as a spirit than as a decayed corpse; still tormented in death and beyond it, a desecration that made his green spirit equal parts rot as growth. And he might be translucent, but she could see his eyes clearly enough as he inclined his head; green now, whatever shade they had been, they held the terrible knowledge that he knew exactly what had been done to him.

“I couldn’t save them,” he said, a voice that drifted, quiet amid the threatening silence just as he was luminous against the shadow threat behind him. “When I saw them, it was too late, and I couldn’t stop it from bringing them back. Nothing can. Every death feeds it. And it spawns death.”

A torrent of words, but with the Overwraith looming up behind him, barely trapped by the wards, it was accurate. “It killed you,” Iswen said.

She felt the weight of the spirit’s gaze, the weight of sorrow and resignation in its eyes. It seemed most spirits had that expression, when it came right down to it: lost and sad. Even Zaknafein; beneath the anger, there had been such a depth of sorrow it could only be despair, just as deep as what echoed in the spirit’s voice now: “They killed me. I had known them all my life,” he continued, mournfully, and apparently unable to stop, “And that mattered less than nothing in the end when they chased me, when they tore me apart.”

“That’s not their fault,” Iswen said, quietly. “Not the people you knew, anyways.” The souls of the villagers were long gone, just as his should be, and she would not condemn the innocent, not matter what had been done with their faces, twisting them into these monsters.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Zaknafein edging farther out to her flank, towards the wall and the arch. Looking, she hoped, for some weakness in the Overwraith, someplace to strike that would not bring the wards crashing down around their ears. Good; she was busy here with the spirit, and that was no less important.

The spirit, the young acolyte, seemed to laugh, flat and bleak, swallowed up by the room. “It doesn’t matter. Soon I will join them. It-” a ripple washed over him, the green fading, like holes that had been poked through him - “eats at me.”

Two days he’d been dead, trapped in this place by the power of the Overwraith. But the villagers hadn’t been dead that much longer. “But you aren’t a wraith yet,” Iswen murmured, more to herself than to him. Faith in the Grain Mother Chauntea - the trust that after death, his body would feed the crops - that was a powerful shield against the despair that was the undead’s greatest weapon: despair and die, just as they had, and become one of them.

The idea seemed to startle him, but then, he’d also only been an acolyte. “No—” he began. 

Zaknafein hissed in pain, loud as a shout from him, here. She whirled, barely needed a glance, and damning her bad leg, lunged, dragging at power that ached as much as it burned through her bones.

The wraith’s claws were deep in his chest, and she was too far away. He retreated, smooth steps a contrast to his snarl and twisting arm, trying to force the wraith back, give him him space enough to use his sword properly.

The wraith kept pace with him, not even bothering to slash. Darkness misted around him, a black aura over his shoulders. Iswen’s gut lurched, instinctively knowing that it was also streaking over his skin, the way the wounds had been on the acolyte’s body. 

It would kill him one way or another. Again. And that seemed the cruelest part of it all.

Iswen struck, knowing the blow was next to useless. Fury and outrage were one thing, but the power of faith was always a new-forged sword: too hot to use too often, and should it cool it turned brittle.Sword edge only faintly sparkling, the shadows overwhelmed the light as it bit into the wraith’s side. Wisps of smoke trailed from it as the wraith recovered, but not nearly enough. 

The wraith whirled away from Zaknafein, and Iswen had just enough time to be thankful. A blur of shadows that she recognized too-late, and icy pain lashed through her arm. Even she, a veteran paladin, couldn’t stop the ragged gasp or keep her sword tip from dipping from the shadow-strike.

The wraith shot forward, a black shadow that filled her vision, larger and darker than the Overwraith, and she braced herself for pain.

Green light enveloped her, the scent of roses and the warmth of sun on her face; a spring wind rushed through her, a power that made her skin prickle because it was not evil but also not hers. “No, Winna, I will not let you destroy another.” His words filled her bones, all the cold and painful spaces, with bright determination.

The wraith - Winna, the village girl who was pledged to be married and had only been foolish - struck the light. The form of the acolyte stood stark against the rim of power for one moment, and then dissolved into green light. Winna pressed harder against it, claws stretching forward eagerly; the light darkened for a shivering moment.

The light surged brighter, rose up higher and crested over her; the green clung like moss, thriving in the dark and damp, the smallest of lives but _life_. No matter what she’d been twisted into, the dark and twisted power of undeath would always give way to life.

Gaps appeared in her shadowy body as it frayed and blew apart, a tree shedding its leaves; Winna cried out, falling back, and in the cry was something achingly human. 

Then she too was gone, and the chamber was cold and empty again. 

The silence rang like a temple bell after pealing the call to worship, and the air seemed to shiver as Iswen drew in one breath, then two, waiting. But the acolyte and Winna were gone; the unholy ground here still pressed against her, but nothing else bit at her. It almost felt like half a victory.

“Right.” She flexed her hand, rotating the sword again: her wrist protested, and the blade trembled in the air, too heavy, the way it hadn’t been since she’d been a squire more than ten years ago. “Fuck,” she grumbled.

Sword drooping, limping, she went to where Zaknafein had pressed himself against the wall, the few steps feeling like leagues. The drow was visibly heaving for breath, but she couldn’t tell if the tension coiling through him was pain or anger: certainly there were hard lines around his jaw and eyes that had little to do with mere pain. “Are you hurt?” she asked.

He huffed something, slashed a gesture to where the acolyte and Winna had been, the corner of his mouth lifting in a sneer. She didn’t need to know exactly what he said for the sharp words to make her hackles rise. “Right, because it’s their fault you forgot the wards didn’t hold her,” she snapped. 

His hard red eyes narrowed, as if he had understood her meaning; perhaps he had, at least as much as she had understood his. He demanded something, and there was more than anger and pain in his voice, there was bitterness. He rocked his shoulders off the wall, gathering his balance again, and stalked away; from the look of his set shoulders, she definitely hadn’t placated him. 

Well, she hadn’t really expected to, but she’d be lying if it didn’t feel good to at least pretend she was talking to someone who could answer her instead of muttering aloud into empty hallways. Soon. One last task, and she could take him back to the chapterhouse, and there would be healing for both of them, and rest, and someone with a fucking spell that translated languages…

“Doomguide,” Zaknafein said, and this time there was a new note of sharpness in his voice, one she didn’t think she’d heard before. She had just enough time to be grateful that at least they had one word between them, but then her eyes fell on his lifted blade, and the pale red light playing over the steel. The stone at the hilt was pulsing again, and this time, this close to them, she could see the runes on the floor flickering as well, fading as the glow strengthened. 

The hilt had started glowing as they approached the door. Had it still been, when he’d fought with Winna? She couldn’t remember, hadn’t seen it clearly enough, not when she’d been focused on the lost spirit. It was the same deep red as the runes. Those cultists who had built this place, created the Overwraith, had been trying to summon and bind something. He’d been caught in a chamber with only magical doors around him. He’d fallen out of that archway of runes. Red runes, glimmering along the edges with gold.

Red runes, like the hilt of his sword.

Her mind whirled, too many thoughts chasing themselves. And pressing down against her, against them, were the wards, the darkness a wave about to crash down on them, swallowing even the light of the runes.

Her eyes found his, nearly the same red as the runes and the pommel stone, and nearly as wide as hers felt. And she saw the moment he realized the same thing she did. 

The cultists hadn’t been binding the Overwraith. They’d bound the portal. And, coming back to life through it, Zaknafein had cracked it, and now that he was closer to it, it fragmented further…

And the Overwraith shattered the wards that remained.

Darkness fell over them with a crash of cold and power, swallowing and consuming the light at her shoulder with careless, silent malice. Then it was her turn, as all that dark power shoved against her, pressure on her head and the scent of corruption up her nose, slime-taste pouring down her throat. 

Pain flared into her knees, spiked into her leg, pain so sharp and hot it didn’t feel like her leg at all. Ears ringing, the too-smooth stone flags were cold and hard against both her hands. She was on the ground. How was she on the ground? Her sword. Where was her sword? She hadn’t heard it drop, hadn’t even felt her hand give way. She groped, stretched her hand, and found only cold bare stone. 

Pain bit again, up her arm and horribly into her back. Her throat tightened around pain, and if she gasped she she damn well couldn’t hear it. She needed to move, shoved an arm forward, crawled towards - was that towards the wraith or the door, she couldn’t remember. 

Pressure on her back, every brick from all the ceilings stacked above her. Something cold and somehow dusty lashed against her shoulders, trailed lower and touched the wounds the wraiths had given her. The blackness around her eyes went white, a cold against her skin so sharp it was hot, something beyond pain.

She convulsed. Her chin struck the floor, and for one sickening moment she knew nothing. It cleared, but her head whirled as she fought back up to her elbows, struggled to drag herself another length. Her armor was too tight around her chest, too heavy on her back. Blessed armor, lighter than it should be, and still no use, not against the wraith and not against this. 

Zaknafein had none at all.

She couldn’t hear him, couldn’t sense him. He was drow; he could have…No. However good he was he couldn’t have slipped out the door before the Overwraith pinned him too. And he wouldn’t have run. She didn’t know why that idea lodged so firmly under her heart but she _knew_ he hadn’t abandoned her even if he had been able to.

He’d been to the left of her, she remembered that much. No point trying to crawl to him when the Overwraith pressed so hard against her she couldn’t move, opened wounds that only bled under her skin and in her soul. 

Iswen pressed her hands against the flagstones, closed her eyes, and pushed away the pulses of pain, the pounding in her skull, the thought of her own death. She reached out beyond her, down into the cold stones. Even under the pain, her skin crawled at the feel of this place under her, a desecrated, unholy place that felt like a festering body, stank of the fear and the death.

People had died here. _People had died here_ , and if it was understandable that the conditions would spawn something like the Overwraith, that only made it worse. “How dare-” she snarled, all she could manage, but the thought was there humming behind her teeth, power all its own.

How dare this abomination bring more death to this place where so many had suffered and died. How dare it glut itself on killing innocents. How dare it twist them to their use when they - when all who’d died here - deserved the peace death could give a life ended in torment.

How dare it try to kill someone who’d just come back from a life that had held so much worse than even this.

Outrage and anger formed a bridge for her power. It leapt from her, a short but sharp lash, and if she couldn’t control it, she didn’t need to. Pale light flashed, and the trailing claws of shadows pulled back. She heaved in the first real breath she’d been able to manage in long minutes. The air stale and dusty but at least didn’t burn in her throat and lungs. The Overwraith was a shadow overhead, blackness pressing against a small dome, but at least she had just a little space, just a little time while it flinched from her.

Zaknafein was on his knees near the wall. There was blood in his white hair, a shock of red streaking down from his temple, but one hand was pressed not to the wound, but to his chest, lips slightly parted and eyes glazed. And in his other hand…. 

She scrambled to him, and somehow the scrapes of knee and palm against the stone hurt just as much as the claws of the wraiths. He was breathing, struggling with it nearly as much as she was, skin too-cool and gray, just visible in his lips and fingers against the black of his skin. Rudely, she closed her hand over his wrist, pressed it open from around the broken hilt of his shattered sword. It clattered to the floor, and she could not care about it, not when she cared so much more about his hand. His palm was intact, and that was a small mercy, the only one they were likely to get.

No choice now. “Zaknafein,” she hissed. “Come on. We’re going to the door.” His eyes shifted from whatever hell they’d been seeing to hers; still too distant, dull red instead of true ruby. “Come on.” She hooked an arm around him, shoved a shoulder against him. She wasn’t standing, not on her own and not with his weight, but damnit, he looked half-dead. She would take the weight of the dead, always. “Leaving now.”

His skin shuddered, something she could feel pressed against him, and his eyes finally sharpened; gratitude made her next breath easier. The press of the Overwraith, the shadows dropping closer, made it harder. The light that had come with her power went grimy gray, dragged at the last dregs of her strength and will.

Red light washed over her skin, brightened his eyes. She followed his gaze down, at the hilt with it’s broken blade, and the steady glow of the stone in the pommel. He tugged his hand out of hers, scooped up the hilt again, turning it over, eyes moving between the stone and the Overwraith, and they did not have time for this. “Zaknafein-”

His hand darted to his temple, came away bloody. He smeared it over the stone, and the red light brightened. For one moment the blood shone against the stone, then it absorbed into the smooth curve; gold flared out from the stone, sparks that he didn’t flinch from.

Staring at it in his hand, she realized what he must have: the sword was connected to him, and he was connected to that place, that nexus these people had been seeking, and he had figured out how to open one of the doors.

As the cult had though, with sacrifice.

He drew back his arm, and the broken blade flashed in the eerie magical lights as he hurled it up into the Overwraith, end over end as if it could still sink its blade into solid flesh, when it didn’t have a blade and the Overwraith didn’t have solid flesh.

But perhaps it had enough of a blade, and the Overwraith enough like flesh.

The sword struck the Overwraith between its glowing red eyes, and vanished. 

The Overwraith didn’t shriek the way Winna had, but in the hidden center of it, something thundered, rolls of pressure almost worse than noise. It reeled back farther up the ceiling, all its tendrils roiling, coiling up into itself, twisting and heaving; more light poured from the center of it, that same red streaked with gold.

Her first instinct was to look for the door; her second was to look for her sword. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to look away from the Overwraith. That, and she wasn’t sure she could stand without help and Zaknafein was staring up into the blackness with vicious intent, mouth twisted in a snarl and hand balled in a fist, radiating a will that would not be denied.

The pressure around her head popped; a hissing that had nothing to do with a living creature in pain or a wraith in a temper, but more with a kettle left to boil too long. For a moment, she thought the entire ceiling was gone. A ball of light and shadow hung in midair, a black center rimmed with red and gold, and she had to look away, unsure if it was really rotating and dragging in the last power of the runes along with every scrap of the Overwraith, or if it was her eyes and gut swimming. It might very well have been both. 

Worse, though, worse when she looked away, and saw shadows drifting up from Zaknafein’s skin; not the retreat of the Overwraith. No, he’d gone paler, black skin truly gray, his breath so short and shallow she had to look closely to see the movement of his chest.

He was connected to that nexus. His blood - a piece of himself - had opened this portal. It had to be a portal, because the Overwraith was being consumed by it, _going_ , and she wished it all the joy of trying to eat death in a place outside and beyond it.

Now the portal was drawing Zaknafein, peeling off parts of his skin and life. 

No. He had suffered enough there. Iswen pressed her hand over his bloody one. He was not going to suffer again in that place, and not just because he’d sent the Overwraith there. “Let go,” she murmured. “You opened it. You don’t have to go back there. You can close it- or let it close. Stay here.”

He looked away from it, looked back at her, still so sharply fierce, the light lancing down over the proud planes of his face and gleaming in his eyes even as it consumed more of him, made his skin seem translucent. He couldn’t understand her words, she knew that. And yet his eyes tracked down to her hand over his, and she could almost feel the shift in her own skin, his will turning back down, back into his own body.

And that was all it took. Such a quiet thing, such a hard thing, to change the course of a mind. The connection broke between him and the portal, and even she could almost feel it, a singe clean cut that sundered the air. In its wake, there was still an undercast to his skin but at least it wasn’t trying to escape up into the portal, and the slump of his shoulders was nearly beautiful, because he was alive and here enough to be exhausted.

Then he collapsed into her lap, too heavy and solid, and far too cold. 

Wind rushed overhead, and she didn’t care, gave the portal only a flicker of a glance as it started to swirl smaller and smaller, the air of the chamber rushing back to fill the place it had been. Her mind was whirling again, nearly as fast the spiraling arms of the closing portal.

He’d been dead. He’d come back through the portal and had been alive, but he’d been carrying the sword, the sword with the hilt that had opened the portal, and now the portal and the connection to the nexus was gone and he was…

She tugged at buckles, awkward with only one hand, fought off her gauntlet, let it drop to the floor, heavy and forgotten as her sword, and pressed shaking fingers to his throat. 

And felt a pulse.

So faint she almost lost it in her short gasp of surprise and relief; somehow absurdly fragile for his swaggering confidence and sharp tongue. But it was there. “Not dead yet,” she murmured, and felt a weight leave her heart and return to Kelemvor in raw, uncomplicated gratitude.

Iswen shifted his body onto her bad leg; she couldn’t feel it anyways and she’d worry about it after she stopped worrying about him. Her breath was harsh in her ears, but this time her bare hand was steady as she set it on his chest.

He wasn’t dead yet, and she was fucking well going to keep him that way.

It was one thing to call down holy fury, wield a bright sword that burned with power. This was something else, less sharp though no less bright; she knew priests and paladins that glowed, crowned with inner peace and actual light as they healed. She’d never been one of them, even when she wasn’t healing on the battlefield and wounded herself.

She gritted her teeth, and didn’t reach for the weapon of Kelemvor’s fury, but tried to hear the silence beyond her pounding heart, the still peace full of a different sort of power. 

Dark and subtle, it welled up from within her, pooled into the fragile skin under her palm - but too much. It ached, one more of them, pressed and bulged and throbbed to each heartbeat. She couldn’t hold it, certainly couldn’t direct it to flow out of her, not when her hands couldn’t hold a sword and even without one still wanted to tremble, when the pressure might be gone from around her head but her temples still throbbed, when she might not have open cuts but still almost felt her blood draining.

Thin as wire, fluid as air, it slipped out of her fingers to the place it had come from, useless and dragging back a good part of her strength with it, a retreating tide. 

No. No, collapsing now because of complaints of skin and muscle was not just a surrender but a betrayal, of him and of her. “Fuck this,” she growled beneath her breath, and gathered strength through the defiance.

Everything hurt, but it would not matter. Not when failing him meant he died. Again. Against her palm was the faint warmth of his skin and fainter pulse, and it drowned out the complaints of her own body with what was real, what mattered more than her life.

“This is not his time,” she whispered to the only one who mattered right now besides him and her. “He doesn’t die here.” Not while she was here. 

And Kelemvor agreed.

Against her spirit, beyond her hands, the power shifted, rippled; her shoulders went cold, and a wave slid down her arms, crested over her elbows, ran down to her wrists, pooled into her hands. It tugged, and her heart pressed against her chest in answer; Iswen breathed out a long breath, understanding loosing it would come with a price.

And she accepted it.

The power spilled out of her, flowed through her hands, and if it took her strength with it, it still poured into him. Until he came awake with a gasp.


	10. Chapter 10

Zaknafein fell.

In the physical world, somewhere vaguely above him, the portal collapsed; the invisible door he’d struggled to hold open long enough thundered shut. A cord of pain tied to his heart snapped, reeling shock and the lash of freedom down into skin and muscle and soul.

He didn’t have to fight anymore, which was just as well since he couldn’t fight anymore. And it was a relief to fall.

He dropped from...somewhere. Somewhere that was somehow _above_ , so that he fell back into his skin. Then pain was another wave that crested over him, and he plunged deeper, drowning, past his skin and into his mind, through something deeper than blackness. He was drow, he knew all the shades of black; knew them by texture and taste. He could have found his way through caverns that had never been touched by even the subtle lights of the Underdark.

It wasn’t _dark_ that pressed against his skin, closed over his eyes.

This was _nothing._ He could not see because here, he had no eyes to see with, and no world to see even if he had them. His skin chilled without being cold, warmth leeched away from him into painful indifference. He didn’t even know that he was still falling, had no wind in his ears or sense of which way was up.

It was so much worse that being trapped in a place merely dark. Worse even than the nexus with its impossible and frustrating doors. There, at least he’d had his swords, his skill. Now, he had nothing, _was_ nothing.

He knew this feeling. He’d felt it twice before.

He felt more than saw the memory of green light, remembered more than felt the almost-pain of itching against a skin long taken from him - or a mind taken from a body that should have been his but wasn’t anymore, not when he couldn’t feel it, much less command it. Even the burst of pain across his chest was muted, something that had happened to someone else: not his fear, bitter in his throat, not the sharp breath just before the knife came down.

And if even those most vivid of memories were faded and dull, then every parry he’d ever known, every argument, the brief flashes of pleasure, of pride, of good - those were nothing, no sooner reached for then shredded into dust and shadow, leaving him empty.

Nothing of his life mattered. Not now.

She’d been right after all, when she’d been a spirit and standing before him in that place, that nexus, not quite an afterlife and not quite life. Doomguide had been right; none of what he had done, what he had been, mattered. Perhaps she hadn’t been right in that place, when he still had life enough to fight, but here? Sliding into death, the last fight against it finally lost, he could hold no memory as a talisman to ward it off. That cold knowledge seeped into him, and with it came a grim certainty.

He’d fulfilled his purpose.

How had he not seen that before? All those long centuries - every blade that crossed his, every priestess he’d fought, every bitter hour in Malice’s bed - his life had moved in a spiral, ever tightening, dragging his steps always to the same place no matter how he tried to walk away from his fate.

He had been born to die.

But not gloriously, not even in battle. Like a third-son, he had been born to be a sacrifice. He’d just had something of a choice in _how_ , the closest any drow male got to a choice.

He had chosen to give his life for others. Defiance turned the sacrifice into one dedicated not to those he hated, but to what he left behind him. Accepting that truth brought at least a shade of peace, let him fade into the nothingness, let him die - not quite happily, but with that strangest concept, that scornful word he thought might yet be a virtue, honor.

Or perhaps…

Warmth stirred around him, somehow not sharp even as it burned away the emptiness around him. It washed over his skin, tickled his lips, and slipped down onto - _into_ \- his chest, a hand with fingers that stretched to cup his heart. That, too, he knew the exact feeling of, knew the pressure of fingers against a beating heart. But these were soft, so careful there was no pain, only the bright thrill of power pressing into him.

This was the exact opposite of what Malice had done to him. Malice had torn his heart from his chest with coldness that laid over not-hidden savage glee. This hand in his chest flexed, released, and gave him back his heart. And if the power was soft-edged, there was iron beneath it, not cold but solid determination.

 _This is not your time to die_. He heard the words ring in his head and could not say if it was Doomguide’s voice or the strange echoes from the nexus or just his own spirit. The echoes of the voice rippled through him, not swallowed by the emptiness. Those echoes, those words, grew stronger, a glorious shout of triumph and strength that stirred through him, demanded he lift his head and heed them.

 _Yes_. He was Zaknafein Do’Urden, and if his memories meant nothing here, he didn’t need them. Before he had made them, before all those long centuries, he had known what he was.

Perhaps his death had always been for sacrifice, but he had not been born to die.

He’d been born to fight.

With his heart beating in his chest, he had enough strength and will left in him to throw himself into this battle, claw and drag himself up out of the pit of nothing.

Back to his skin, back to true light, and warmth.

And pain.

Dust filled his nose as he dragged in a breath, and however sweet it was to feel his chest move, the air burned his lungs, choked his throat. He gasped, gagging and coughing. Reflexively, he curled up to get away from the dust, to breathe, but daggers lanced through his chest, burning cold, and his head spun. He didn’t lower it so much as drop flat, panting; he reached up with thick fingers for the wound.

His hand bumped something that was not his skin nor his shirt; his fingertips ghosted over knuckles, and only then did he realize that, even besides the pain, there was light pressure against his chest, right over his heart. And something digging into the small of his back, a tiny little pinch that strangely centered him. He blinked, and blurry colors above him sharpened.

Doomguide gazed back down at him, crowned with the faded light above her head, hollow-eyed but lips curved into what could only be a smile of triumph. She said something, all quiet, smooth words, and the hand on his chest lifted to his temple. The ache there eased too.

She’d healed him. He wasn’t laying on the ground but on her. And her eyes were not iron gray, but silver - how had he not realized it before, when they glowed so brightly against all the shadows?

Those thoughts were terribly important, and he closed his eyes to appreciate them fully.

He’d been wounded worse than this, of course, or at least had lost more blood; a drow male like him did not live close to four hundred years and not shed his share of blood, and some of that had dripped from his skin instead of his blades. But the only time he’d let a priestess of Lolth heal him had been the times when he hadn’t been able to put the stitches in himself. It had always been a coin toss if that had hurt less than a priestess putting her hands on him and being forced to listen to her prayers to the Spider Queen as she called for power to heal the unworthy.

No prayers from Doomguide. No noisy ones, anyways. Something hummed in her throat, a rumble he could almost feel run down through her, and her hand returned to his chest, that light pressure he could only just feel, nothing so firm as pain. Perhaps she wasn’t quite done with the healing, though if she had more power to pour into him, he couldn’t feel it, not in his skin and not collecting his drifting thoughts.

He couldn’t bring himself to care either way, not so long as it was almost comfortable to be here.

At least until she tapped his chest. “Ay,” she said, or something like: her low voice rasped, made it hard for him to tell if it was a word or just a sound. But when she tapped on his chest again, he dragged his eyes open and met hers, as much of a question as he could manage.

She told him something, nodding at…was the door over that way? Or the back wall? Or perhaps an altar? Whatever it was she was going to have to investigate on her own, since he wasn’t sure he could move and certainly didn’t want to. Of course, if she wanted to get up, he would have to at least have to shift to let her - though that would mean that the pleasant warmth and support from her would still be gone. Perhaps he could simply feign death.

“Zaknafein.” Her throat closed around the word, choking, the pronunciation too-careful. She also thumped her fingers hard enough on his chest he felt the echo in his lungs. He reopened his eyes - when had he closed them again? - and she repeated her gesture, coupled it with shifting her legs under him, a clear enough indication of what she wanted he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t understood.

It seemed feigning death worked about as well as actually dying. Though, under the circumstances, perhaps he shouldn’t mind so much he was alive to be disappointed to have to move. Or to figure out how to do that in the first place.

Zaknafein pressed a hand against the floor, stone cool and dusty, and pushed himself up from Doomguide’s lap. The room swirled around him again, and his hand was pressed against the wall. No, that wasn’t right, it was on the floor, he was sure it was on the floor. He blinked, hard, jaw tightening, and willed the room steady.

He’d been right, and wrong. He had a hand on the floor _and_ a hand on the wall. And he was breathing harder than he had a right to after that little exercise, but he couldn’t seem to stop, or steady his thoughts. But at least he was upright, if not yet standing. He glanced over his shoulder to see if Doomguide appreciated his efforts.

She was still sitting where he’d left her, slump-shouldered and awkwardly sprawled legs like a crippled spider, looking somewhere between him and the wall as if she couldn’t imagine what came next in this. He had a feeling his expression was a mirror to hers.

A deep breath that visibly expanded her chest, and he saw in it the marshaling of strength and will, and thought he knew how much of both it took for her to shift her legs under her, push herself up to her knees. Even only that far up, she swayed, reached for the wall, steadying herself with a pressed palm to it, pale skin a mirror to his. But when she got a foot under her, he could also see her tremble with the effort of it.

He put his shoulder under hers, not quite sure how he’d gotten there, pushing against her to shore her up. Her hand cupped his elbow to give him leverage, and the room turned over around him.

And they were on their feet, swaying together but standing in the middle of the sanctum. “The heroes triumphant,” he said, or meant to, his voice as strained as hers, shading bitterness to already-bitter words.

She laughed. Or trembled. Or coughed. The female was pressed against him, his arm across her shoulders and hers around his back, and all he could tell was that she quivered against him. She breathed out something that he assumed was: “Yes, Zaknafein, you have such a delightfully sharp tongue, I very much enjoy it.”

Drifting. Drifting, to a thought that shouldn’t cause pleasure. Drifting, to that little curl of amusement anyways. Drifting, to something he shouldn’t indulge in, much less when it was too hard to stand without leaning on her.

Her grip tightened around him, and she leaned forward, staggered. Was that a step or a fall? Couldn’t catch her, not and stay upright. Why was it important to stay upright when the floor had been so nicely solid and stable and she’d been warm? Not that it was stable now; he stepped forward because she gave him no choice, and midway through the step discovered the ground was not where he had left it. It was entirely unfair.

Where he left something. “Wait,” he said, stopping her before she could take another step. It wasn’t hard, when all it took was leaning on his back leg and she lolled against him, following the shift of his weight, no more able to resist his pull than he could hers. “Wait,” he repeated, and twisted to scan the floor. Not his sword, all that was left of it was shards, and he wasn’t sure the hilt still existed on this plane.

But he hadn’t been the only one with a sword.

It wasn’t a large room, and now that the shadows caused by the wraiths were gone, lit well enough by Doomguide’s light. There were two piles of fabric against the back wall that his mind refused to see as bodies, not right now. Not when there would be time for that later, time to sort out how he felt about dead humans when no matter how hard he’d tried, he’d never felt _nothing_ about dead drow and he thought these might have deserved their death far less than most drow. There was undoubtedly more interesting mosaics of something from the Lower Planes on the walls, and he was dully grateful that all he saw of it was a blur of color.

And three steps away on the floor was Doomguide’s sword.

He could manage three steps. He was a drow _weaponsmaster_. He’d fought poisoned and bloody and with a priestess’s mind riding in his. He gritted his teeth and shuffled forward carefully in case his bare feet found the shards of his sword, and found triumph in being able to stay upright.

Staring down at it, he almost bent down to pick it up, but the world churned around him again, as if about to take away even his smallest victory today. Memory tugged, of all those long hours he’d been bored enough in House Do’Urden that he found all kinds of useless ways to entertain himself in the armory and training gym so he didn’t have to see anyone else. He wiggled his foot under the hilt, testing the weight and finding the balance-point, then neatly kicked it up into his hand.

However broken her voice, Doomguide managed to sing a word that he would lay good coin translated to “ _Showoff_.” But in spite of what would be a lash from a priestess, when he shuffled back to her, she gave him the honor of the sheer effort it took to smile as she took the sword from him, sheathing it at her hip.

Something fragile in his chest settled; at least one of them was armed. Theoretically, they’d already killed everything that could hurt them in this place. He trusted that about as much as he’d trusted Jarlaxle’s smile. What good a sword would do when he wasn’t sure either of them was able to fight, he wasn’t sure. He didn’t care. They had a sword, and that always made things better.

She shuffled forward one step, then tried another; a strangled gasp came from her throat as her bad leg buckled when she tried to put weight on it. With half a lunge and half a stumble, he put himself back under her arm, catching her before she could fall. She was quivering against him again, ragged breaths that could only be pain, but she didn’t have to be able to stand straight to give him a center, a place where the room stilled. So when she stepped forward again, he moved with her, steps not much steadier than hers, forward, letting her lean her weight on him.

And so they dragged themselves through the corridors of the ruin, somewhere between shadows and light as the globe trailed in their wake. Leaning into each other, staggering from wall to wall, like two companionable drunks headed back to their House, just sober enough to know how much trouble they’d be in to break curfew, and drunk enough not to care. It felt strange, like trusting her, but then she couldn’t hurt him now even if she wanted to. Stranger, to have the notion that she didn’t _want_ to hurt him anymore than he wanted to hurt her swirling against him like the rest of the world.

He banged his elbow leaving the narrow passage from the ritual space, then his hip as they rounded the corner down the long hallway. Just more aches against his skin, hot when his chest still felt cold, when he panted at the effort of walking even with someone to hold him up.

But then they entered the antechamber, and Doomguide still had strength to swear, low and stuttering as she halted in her tracks, staring at something that was admittedly a problem. She reached over to tap his chest, fingers wiggling, crawling their way up as far as she could reach, like the legs of spiders, or a mage’s waving hands. The ball of light helpfully drifted up beyond the ceiling, but her eyes stayed on his, a hopeful little cock of her head as she waited.

Staring at the steps cut into the stone wall, he shook his head. “I can’t levitate,” he said, hand stretched in front of him, wiggling fingers clenching into a fist, a dead spider - or mage - to make his point clear. Most nobles could by birth, but one such as him, commoner scum? He’d never had that magic in his blood, only against his shoulders in the folds of a _piwafwi_ ; he’d longed for one for its warmth when he’d been in the nexus, wished for one now for its other properties, but he’d yet to meet a goddess or priestess who cared about the wanting or wishing of one such as him.

Of course, Doomguide was hardly an ordinary priestess; he looked down at her and arched an eyebrow with the faintest quivers of hope in his chest. She sighed. He took that as a no, she didn’t have a magic cloak or broach or spell to levitate them both up through the ceiling’s door either, and thus, this was going to hurt.

She stepped forward, didn’t try to do anything but drag her leg after her, and grabbed the lip of a step for support. Looking back over her shoulder at him, she tapped her chest, jabbed her finger upwards. Zak shrugged, eased over to lean a shoulder against the wall, as if he was casually waiting for a priestess to wander off so he could get back to work; if she wanted to be first up she was welcome to it, and he would take the time to lean his head against the cool stone wall and wait for the world to settle around him before he tried adding dimensions to his movement.

His good intentions lasted as long as it took Doomguide to plant her feet on the bottom step, step up to the second with her first leg, and then try to lift her bad leg high enough to get it on that second step. She cried out, soft and sharp as a whip’s snap, and twisted sideways, fingers and boots slipping on the stone.

And he was somehow there before she could fall, head protesting the sudden movement but hand strong enough to grab the back of her hauberk and press her against the wall. It would not be a high fall, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t hurt. And it seemed he cared very much that she wasn’t hurt any more than she already was.

Zak put it aside, a complicated thought that didn’t matter, not in the end. Not when she was panting and undoubtedly swearing under her breath, under his hand, shaking from the effort of doing no more than clinging not more than a foot off the ground. “Strong priestess,” he said, voice as soft as hers, knowing she couldn’t understand more than a soothing tone, and apparently caring about that as little as he cared about appearing uncaring. “You did well. You were strong enough when it mattered most.”

The tail of her dark braid tickled over his wrist, familiar even if the braid itself was too simple to be a drow House’s pattern; his knuckles brushed the vulnerable nape of her neck, and the trust she showed to stay so still with him at her back was almost erotic. He stepped away from those thoughts for one that was more important now, no matter it hadn’t occurred to him at anything like a useful moment: “Why in the world aren’t you wearing a helm?”

She huffed something, but at least doing so had her head lifting, perhaps a little stung by his pointed words, or perhaps simply with her strength gathered again. She glanced over her shoulder at him, and asked something that needed no translation at all.

As she’d asked, he stayed there, with his hand on her - first her shoulder, then the small of her back, then her waist, then he decided not to push his luck as far he otherwise might and cupped the back of her knee. Then she hooked her elbows on the lip of the ceiling and, like the blind salamanders of Lake Donigarten, slithered on her belly up over the ledge.

When her legs cleared the gap with a writhing kick, it meant it was his turn, and it had been much, much easier when it was someone else climbing up the steps in the wall and he just had to keep them from falling backwards off it. “You people should have spells of levitation like a sensible race,” he grumbled as he set his foot on the first step, stone too smooth and cold against his bare feet, and looked up, squinting into the beams of light, trying to judge the climb. Not high; not like the soaring central hall that led up to the upper floors of House Do’Urden. High enough, when his eyes insisted the wall was pitched off-vertical, that the opening shifted back and forth like one of the shadowy wraiths.

But he wasn’t staying down here. With a deep breath that made his chest burn - and the pain had the world snapping back to his skin - he reached up, and began.

He climbed in as many fits as she had, taking his time feeling his way up to the next rung with first one foot, then the second, always banging or scraping both of them. Balancing on a step, heels over the ever-growing gap of the drop and toes digging for purchase against smooth limestone, lingering between steps wasn’t a rest. But he always needed one between steps, needed to take a couple of quick breaths that were not ragged panting as he looked up and tried to figure out how many feet he’d climbed, and tell himself that even halfway up the wall, he’d survive a fall.

But that was never the fear. The fear was he wouldn’t have the strength or will to try again, that he would lay down here in the darkness, close his eyes, and die. And they had both fought too hard to accept that fate.

He was three-quarters up, reaching for the next step even as his eyes insisted that surely he was supposed to be at the top already, that it must be in reach, when a gauntleted hand reached down from above and took his; strong and firm, the center point to balance him, even if she couldn’t haul him the rest of the way up. He could still follow the gentle tug of suggestion in her fingers, the first time he did so willingly for a female, and heaved himself the rest of the way through the gap, rolling away from the open pit.

The world rushed around him, and even with his back flat on the floor he had the sense he was still turning over and over, his chest aching and all the little scrapes and bruises throbbing. He didn’t care. He must have rolled over her at some part in that but apparently she cared about that as little as he did. He wasn’t climbing anymore but staring up at a different ceiling.

 _Small victories_. Perhaps those were all he was going to get in this life. He’d take it.

The ceiling was wrong. He frowned as he stared up at the pale gray limestone, smooth arches vaulting up to meet at the peak in a gentle point. Carved, fluted pillars marched along the walls, support and more decoration in the elegance of their carvings. A solid hall for a House.

And not. Not when his senses insistently told him _Hollow_ , an expanse greater than just another floor above them. It felt not like being in a House, but in the wilds of the Underdark, and there was a massive cavern above them, not more than a few feet separating it from the hall. He frowned. That wasn’t safe; anything might find a crevasse or have the magic to move through stone and pass through, ambush them from above.

He turned his head to tell Doomguide, warn her; she was human, she could hardly be expected to know just how dangerous a place when you couldn’t see the place danger might come from. She was already sitting up - well, what passed for up, shoulders slumped and arms hooked over her knees - and stared back at him with a hollow-eyed glazed expression, as if she had drained away the last dreges of her strength helping him up the last steps.

Which meant getting them to safety was on his shoulders.

Zak closed his eyes, sorted out the complaints of his senses, set aside those that were just from having a wraith stab him through the chest and the Overwraith drag him down towards death and the portal try to finish the job. Half-dead or not, he was still drow, and even half-dead his senses were keen: keener, really, with the desperate need to cling to life bred and drilled into them.

The dust of the place bloomed on his tongue, bitter limestone and faded expensive wine; the ceiling was too bright, even with her light, even behind closed lids - that had been half of what was wrong, he shouldn’t have been able to see the detail of the fluted pillars, not if the world was right.

And there was a hissing wind. Not one that chased down and into this chamber, but not one far off, either, and thick with scents of…he struggled for anything to describe the rich, wet scent. Moss, he supposed. Moss growing wild and untouched for centuries. It might even be safe, or might be a hunting ground for a predator, as was only sensible. But it wasn’t here and he rather thought the priestess needed to be anywhere but here to recover.

They had a sword. He could protect her. But not flat on his back.

He rolled to his belly and pushed himself up, and this time, all the walls and ceiling stayed in place, where he’d left them. He still stepped carefully, not trusting his feet, as he crossed to her.

This time, he was the one who reached down and offered her a hand up. And her strong grasp, the faded smile that brightened dulled gray eyes as she let him guide her up, felt no less grateful than his had been. He itched to take the sword from her, but even witnessing that she wasn’t nearly as touchy as a priestess of Lolth, he didn’t quite dare. Instead, he put himself at her right hip, curving against her; it didn’t just brace her bad leg, it made the cross-body reach for her weapon possible. Not _fun_ , but he’d done worse to get a weapon into his hand.

She seemed to take his meaning, or seemed to understand where they were. She croaked a word, lifted the hand that wasn’t gripping his back. Her fingers shook, but she pointed unerringly to the far wall of the cavern. Dark patch of shadows, or darker, anyways, even when the ball of light started drifting in that direction to guide their way. But that way was also a stronger scent of wet and moss. Good enough.

He tightened his grip around her, coaxed her the first few steps forward. Then she was stumbling and swaying at his side, and his steps weren’t entirely as steady as he’d like either, but they were moving forward, towards safety or at least away from danger.

Barely a few steps into the narrow passage, and he almost stumbled. He halted, closed his eyes, and waited until the world was steady again. And when he opened his eyes, on balance and adjusted to the light, he found that it hadn’t been his senses; the ground really was sloping upward, gradually. And he had been the only one to have been caught by surprise by it. “You knew about this?” he asked, looking over at Doomguide.

She nodded, half against his shoulder, and who knew what she thought she answered. She managed a step on her own. He didn’t let her take the second alone, not when he could feel her shaking, hip to foot, with the pain of it.

“Which one of us is worse off, do you expect?” he mused as they managed a few more steps before veering too close to a wall - no, not a wall, a door with a grate that made him vaguely queasy for the familiarity. Unless that was the way he was half-convinced the passage was sloping down and turning over. “You can hardly walk and I can hardly see straight.”

She straightened, her chest tightening, and he could almost feel her marshaling her will to follow words in a language she didn’t understand. Folly in the Underdark to make so much noise approaching a strange cavern, but it helped her here, so he kept talking. 

“If it comes to a fight, we’re both going to fall over at the first strike. I suppose we could use that position to stab our opponents in the ankles, cut the tendons there. Then when they fall over, we can cut their throats.” At least he wasn’t entirely prattling away like Jarlaxle. He actually thought those tactics would work, assuming they didn’t get their own throats cut in the first moment of battle.

His toes hit something, and he swayed as he blinked. The darkness swarmed in front of him, living shadows, and he reached for the sword. Doomguide blocked him, her forearm against his fingers. She spoke, and no matter how rough her voice she still managed to sound soothing. He was starting to believe she meant it. She gestured in front of them, lifted a foot. “ _More_ steps?” Zak said. “Is this how you people get up somewhere without spells, just chop away at the stone until you get where you want to go?”

At least these steps were broader and did not involve scrambling up the wall. It meant the dip in the center was deeper, smoother: more feet had worn down this path. It meant something, that people had used it so often: why would they abandon a stronghold? Not willingly. 

He braced himself for the fight as they climbed the last of the steps. The ceiling lowered with each step, and he knew this tactic: force anyone entering a sanctuary to do so with head lowered, all the better for the axe to sweep down on the exposed neck.

His shoulders tightened, but even he couldn’t keep from ducking his head under the pressure of senses that told him all that hollowness above was about to come crashing down right after he banged his head on the ceiling. Doomguide’s arm tightened around him, and he felt her deep-drawn breath, felt her steady against him. She was murmuring again, and if her language didn’t have the liquid syllables of an elven language, he would lay good coin that her words didn’t have so many blades in them.

She pushed forward, step by slippery step, too fast, her light zipping after her and then swallowed up by the darkness…and something else. The soft huffs of her panting breaths were nearly louder than his pulse, his racing heartbeat so loud he wondered why he’d wanted the damned thing back.

But physical aches and uncertain steps couldn’t drown out the whispers of danger that raced down his skin: the wind was stronger, the light brighter, nowhere for them to hide, every advantage on what enemy was waiting for them, crouched to tear out their throats.

He had not lived so long by ignoring a weaponsmaster’s instinct for danger. He just couldn’t slow her now, not with her jaw set tight to keep from gasping as she lengthened her stride and did her best to take more than one wide step at a time. And with her hand twisted into his shirt, he wasn’t sure she’d have let him even if he tried. Irritation flickered, and drowned in pain and the determination pulsing from her. All he could do was match her pace and keep her upright.

Then they were across some threshold; his toes dug into the soft moss the scent had promised, a mercy on his feet, cool and a little damp. The walls receded from all his senses, the wind strengthening and carrying more of those strange scents with it, not just the moss underfoot but others: they’d come up into a truly massive cavern. And high: so high the ceiling lifted up and away from him, but the light somehow strengthened instead of darkness dropping on him.

Doomguide pivoted at his side, started deeper into the center of the cavern; he didn’t know how she managed, but surely she understood that the most dangerous place was where anything might attack from any side, including above. He looked about, the cavern a blur of softened moss and stone walls, tried to find a nook where they might —

Zaknafein stopped in his tracks. His mind caught up with what his eyes and spatial sense already knew.

There were no cavern walls around him. The reason the scents were strange and the wind was strong was because there was nothing to bind it. There were tumbled lines of stones, almost walls, almost stalagmites, but too small for either; his gaze slid over them, following the lines of stone from base to peak, and then higher, above them…

Higher than the walls, higher than _everything:_ blue-black, bright with points of light blazing down above him, _on_ him, so many they made the light she’d carried insignificant. 

_Sky. Night. Stars._ Foreign words, but he knew them. He’d heard the training Masters of Melee-Magthere rail against them to young recruits, but he’d always been one to stand off to the side as they did, letting his mind go blank and the hours wash through him because he knew what they said wasn’t true: why should they lie about everything else and yet tell the truth about this?

He just didn’t need the lie to know that he didn’t belong there. All he’d needed had been one moment.

This time, he did not think his spinning head merely came from senses still uncertain after pain and trauma. This time, he didn’t abruptly find cold stone on his knees, but that soft damp moss - _grass_. He’d once, and only once, tasted that smell, just like this, carried on a wind that ran forever across the world, so long ago.

“ _Surface_ ,” he managed. “This is the _surface_.” He’d known the ruin hadn’t been in the Underdark, not with Doomguide - so solidly _human_ \- at his elbow through it all. But it had been underground, and so he hadn’t really thought more of it beyond that. He hadn’t considered that they might leave the ruin, or where they would be when they did, much less _here_.

He’d never thought he would feel the stars on his skin again. He’d never wanted to, had pushed those memories aside, buried them so they couldn’t hurt with something that wasn’t a promise but a taunt: what life could a drow, bred for the Underdark, have here, in a place all his senses told him was _wrong_? To see the surface once had been a mercy, but after, remembering that there was something besides Menzoberranzan had made the world around him press closer, until he’d nearly gone mad with frustration and rage and despair.

Better to forget, better to know it was something out of his reach, escape impossible instead of merely improbable. He could throw himself against Menzoberranzan, defiant against a twisted world; he could not have made that impossible trek again, and the parts through the dangers of the Underdark would have paled in comparison to being alone on the strangeness of the surface.

And yet, there were stars above him.

And if they were bright, she was brighter.

She stood a few steps from him, and she fitted into the sky, sparkled under the light of the stars: not wounded, not broken, not with the proud lift of her head. A priestess: of course she looked tall and powerful when he was on his knees. But it was more than that. With her there was always more, and never what he expected. Her hands spread, her head inclining as if she had understood his words.

And perhaps she had, the same way he knew the word she spoke, with bone-deep intuition that needed no chanted spell, no pantomime.

“ _Welcome_.”

And from her, in this moment, he could even believe that might be true, even for a drow like him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ten chapters and 40K words later, the summary is finally accurate!


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for everyone's patience with the hiatus over NaNoWriMo!

Iswen had never felt anything better than the night wind on her face, full of the sweet dampness of wet earth and just an edge of autumn, coolness under softly rustling leaves. It had her shivering, or perhaps that was the effort of staying on her feet in the empty ruin of a castle. She panted, and couldn’t tell if it was from the desperate joy of clean air that wasn’t full of ghosts and wraiths and pain and dust, or from the unwary, unwise scramble these last few feet to get under the sky.

It didn’t matter, not right now. It was enough that she felt the irritation wash off her skin, like a cleansing rain falling from the clear night sky. Now, this place was just another square of tumbled-down walls and towers; what she and Zaknafein had done in the secret basements below had broken the oppressive malevolence of the place. Now, there were even birds chirping, singing the night chorus. Closing her eyes, she identified them on reflex: a thrush and robin in counterpoint, squabbling for territory with music. Night birds, autumn birds that would winter over here. Maybe now they would even find shelter in these walls.

A sharp noise, soft but hissing, jarred her out of something almost a memory and was certainly more wool-gathering than she should be doing in a ruin at night. The world swayed around her, and she had definitely taken those last few steps too fast. She’d gone from having too much pride and compassion to demand her companion bear her weight and injuries as well as his own, to realizing that if she didn’t lean on him they were both going to fall over, and then it hadn’t mattered because he hadn’t moved fast enough. 

But she could forgive her drow companion for moving slowly to climb those last steps - especially if his wide eyes and thunderstruck expression rightly implied that this was the first time he'd stood under the sky. It was more than wariness in his eyes now, not the cool assessment he’d used when he swept a glance over the dark corners, or the stark pain when the wraith had pounced on him, or the bare fear when the Overwraith had broken free. 

She’d thought he’d been rattled then, but that was nothing compared to this. His red eyes darted wildly, over the treetops she couldn’t see and the sharp lines of what had once been walls, lingering only moments before being drawn up again. He wasn’t shaking the way she was: he was holding himself so tightly still she knew he was ready to lunge the instant a shadow moved wrong. 

She took a step towards him, hands spread to show him there was no danger, not from her and not from this place. “It’s alright,” she said, low and easy, the same soothing tone she’d use with a skittish and temperamental stallion. 

His eyes locked on hers, lips parted to silently pant breaths in and out. And slowly, so slowly, the panic receded; she watched the strong-willed warrior fight for control of his instincts. Because he trusted her, even when he couldn’t understand her words. The honor of that was humbling, especially as she knew full well he hadn’t trusted her through much of the ruin.

Well, she hadn’t trusted him either. But he did now, since she’d kept him from dying again. And so did she, since he’d been willing to die to kill the Overwraith. 

“It’s alright, Zaknafein,” she repeated as she stepped closer, and tried not to wobble. The pain in her bad leg was a solid mass from hip to thigh, until she couldn’t tell where she’d been stabbed. “We’re safe.” She prayed, quick and fierce, that she was telling the truth. 

She took another step, and praise bright Tymora’s smile, she was right in front of him when her leg decided it had enough of the day and quit working; she folded herself down, and could make it seem like she was kneeling with him deliberately.

Clever drow, he wasn’t fooled; his smile was rueful, softer than she’d seen before, as he inclined his head towards her. He extended his hand, and she took it gratefully, her shoulders settling at the warmth and pressure. It warmed her - something so simple as a friendly hand in hers.

But however much she valued the connection, she’d burned the very last of her reserve strength getting up here. She wasn’t dragging herself up this time, not even with him to help; more, she wouldn’t ask that of him, not after all he’d done, the wounds he was still carrying himself.

He did try, tugging at her and looking back towards the steps down to the basement, making noises that were nearly as soothing as hers. Iswen snorted, all her diplomacy used up, too. “The fuck I’m going back down there,” she said. In case he hadn’t yet figured out which of her words were curses, she pointed at the door leading down, and raised the gesture he always seemed so surprised she’d picked up from him. She wasn’t sure why it was a shock she had; the first important words anyone learned in a different language were the more interesting curses. 

Or perhaps she just enjoyed the sight of his eyebrow - shockingly white against true-black skin - winging up, unwilling amusement sparking in his eyes. Even now - especially now, when they were both raw with exhaustion and pain.

As bad as it was, she knew from bitter experience that it would have been far worse if she’d been alone: the way she’d been sent to the ruin, with only her sword and will. Never mind the question of how she would have killed the Overwraith without him - or how she would have found the priest’s chamber without him - Iswen closed her eyes and thought of trying to drag herself back up those steps.

It would have taken her far longer, and hurt worse, and would have left her laying here staring up at the black sky and uncaring stars, a stones-throw from the acolyte’s decaying corpse; the thought had cold walls pressing around her until she shivered. 

He murmured, a word, perhaps a name, but it was the squeeze of his hand on hers that had her opening her eyes, the biting spiders of _what if_ sliding off her skin. Not alone. Unlooked for, certainly unexpected, but she hadn’t been alone. And she still wasn’t alone.

And she had a duty to him. Iswen took a deep breath and shifted her weight to see if she had just one more ounce of strength left, a little more will to get her legs under her and stand. 

No. Her leg had stopped hurting, but the cold numbness left in its wake was far worse. Her heartbeat thundered in her chest, and she pushed it down, pushed back the unnerving sense of not being able to feel the ground under one knee. Expected. It was just what she should have expected. After running on it, fighting on it, of course she should have expected it. And she _would_ fight on it again. She just had to shove down the fear and focus on the problem, one more in the whole line of problems today.

She had asked for her miracle to save him, but that meant that her head swam at the mere thought of doing more than conjuring light. She could pray all she liked, but she needed rest before she could handle divine power. But she certainly wasn’t going to walk any farther without healing her leg, and the idea of stretching out on the grass with stars for a blanket was only a reasonable one in the cheapest chapbook novels.

“I always hated Tutor Aravilar’s chicken and egg problem,” she muttered. Zaknafein made a sharp noise, and she realized that the syllables of the name might sound familiar to an elf, and why a drow might be slightly too interested in them. “It’s no one you know,” she said.

He didn’t look mollified, but she didn’t give him a chance to protest; happily, there was one good solution to the problem. Her tutor had always hated her solutions, his long mouth twisting into a moue of distaste whenever she found a third answer. That had always made them the best sorts of victory. 

Sticking two fingers in her mouth, she whistled, high and sharp. 

Zaknafein hissed through his teeth, and yelled at her in that way she was becoming accustomed to: sharp, biting words in an undertone while he looked for a weapon and something to put his back against so he could face the threat she’d summoned.

Which wasn’t entirely fair: “Between the wraiths and the Overwraith you’ve done far more in the way of putting us in danger,” she snapped. Technically, anyways. She supposed he could argue right back that she’d been the one in the ruin in the first place, but if she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have met him, and he wouldn’t be here. 

She’d sort it out later. 

Her headache hadn’t quite eased, though the tightness from being surrounded by death-soaked stone had broken. But even if her pulse felt too loud, her skin too fragile, she knew what the steady drumming in the distance was. She closed her eyes, smiling, and savored the sound of the first good thing that had happened today.

Right up until Zaknafein tugged at her hand, murmuring to her with a fairly decent attempt at soothing. Not that he managed it; she’d heard him be actually soothing, gentleness in his calloused hand and flowing around syllables that had edges to them. Hearing violence twisted into softness - even without knowing what the words meant - had left her more breathless than almost falling from the fucking concealed steps. This was an echo of that, but with an urgency under it, a warning even before his hand shifted to her elbow, pressed up as if he could scoop her up and haul her off to cover. 

Opening her eyes to his - wide and unsettled and darting over the black shadows of the ruins - a shiver ran up her spine. He was the best scout she’d ever worked with, carried all that wariness and sharp senses in his skin. If he was unsettled, she had every reason to be, too. 

Except this wasn’t the ruins: this was the surface. Nutmeg rounded the corner of the castle’s ruined walls and slowed from a trot to a brisk extended walk, head lowered, chestnut coat darker in starlight. Iswen stared at Zaknafein. “You’ve never seen a horse before, have you?” she asked.

It was rhetorical; he’d fixed his eyes on the mare, the wildness was replaced by a narrowed look of consideration, gathered stillness under his skin, the way he did right before he burst into motion.

Even having fought with him, she didn’t expect that motion to be a darting grab for the hilt of her sword. It was half clear of the sheath before she could grab his wrist. “Don’t you fucking dare kill my destrier,” she hissed. 

He glared at her, tugged at the sword, and the ripple of skin and muscle under her fingertips had her heart seizing: he was more than strong enough, even now, to rip that sword out from under her hand, and he, at least, could stand. Could he fight? Maybe: Iswen figured he’d give it a damn good try. He just didn’t have to now. 

She held up her free hand. “Do you trust me?” she asked. Stupid words, words that didn’t matter, not when it was all in the tone, the same way he’d soothed her. This wasn’t quite soothing, wasn’t quite a command, but it got his attention. And if his grip on the sword was so tight that she could feel his arm trembling, well, he might be terrified enough to want the weapon, but he stopped trying to draw it, eyes darting from Nutmeg - who’d slowed to an outright amble - to hers, before shifting back to the approaching mare, still narrowed and taut, but at least willing to wait.

Good enough. With her free hand, Iswen reached back behind her, palm up; she didn’t dare loosen her grip on him, just as she didn’t dare take her eyes off him even as she felt Nutmeg’s attention flick to her hand, sensed her destrier’s ambling pace and ears prick up. She didn’t need to, not with Nutmeg. A paladin’s destrier could not be purchased, not from any farm, for any price. Each one was a gift given to a particular paladin, and that divine bond ran deeper than any silent communication between horse and rider. 

No, it was Zaknafein’s reactions she didn’t trust, not right now. Not with his hand on her sword and full intent in his eyes as he tracked Nutmeg’s approach over her shoulder. He scarcely seemed to breathe as Nutmeg’s head lowered. Her velvety muzzle pressed against Iswen’s fingertips, and she smiled to feel the warm huffed snort on her back when Nutmeg didn’t find a sugar cube offered.

But, in spite of that failing, Nutmeg stayed there, and Iswen twisted her hand to rub the offered nose, scratching up her broad white blaze to fondle her ear; it earned her a deeper huff and a shift of weight, washing warmth and companionship over her until she sagged from the sheer relief of having her here. _Not alone._

And only then did Zaknafein relax, her sword slipping from his hand and back into its sheath as he sat back on his haunches, eyes slightly less intent but still fixed on the horse, less wide but not quite what she’d call welcoming and trusting. Maybe less wary was the best a drow could do.

“It’s alright,” she said, and wasn’t quite sure which of them she was addressing. Her fingers sank into Nutmeg’s thick mane, tugging a suggestion to step closer, so her muzzle swung over her shoulder. Iswen took Zaknafein’s hand and placed it on her nose. “This is Nutmeg. She’s mine. He’s mine.”

The words popped out, thoughtless, and as if understanding them, Nutmeg snorted. Or perhaps that was her response to Zaknafein’s careful stretch of his fingers, something that was almost, but not quite a stroke. She certainly side-stepped, surprisingly delicate for something of her size, and press into his hand, presumably on the chance that he would have something for her. “Keep doing that,” she told him. “She likes that. Make friends, you’re going to need it.”

And that left her free to consider a few other logistics. Nutmeg was larger than most palfreys or even coursers, but a destrier was no lumbering drayhorse, with broad shoulders to pull a cart; her mare was solidly built and muscular, but compact. The comparison to the drow currently studying her with almost as much aloof dispassion as the mare showed him flitted into her head, and Iswen shoved it away. Problem was, Nutmeg could carry her in armor, fully armed herself, and fight if she had to. Adding another person to her back? That was more complicated. 

She fumbled, found the buckles of her gauntlets, and fought them free; she ignored Zaknafein’s scandalized hiss as she slid them down her arms. “Hush, it’s not like I’m stripping everything,” she told him. Just practically everything, everything that mattered, as she loosened her swordbelt, slipped it from her waist, then started on the buckles of the leather hauberk, shrugging it off her shoulders. 

Not vulnerable. She told herself that, but her skin was cold as she ducked her head, wiggled and gasped a little as she worked the chainmail shirt over her head. She was unfinished, too light, as she dropped it to the ground next to the hauberk - heard the rings jingle as it ended in an untidy heap, but louder was the voice in her mind of her Knight-Master, scolding her for being careless with something that kept her alive. 

“Later,” she told him, that stern-eyed ghost of a warrior she could almost see in front of her, but that was wrong, there were no ghosts here. He wasn’t here even though he was dead, and that meant he could wait a little, and so could the chainmail. It wasn’t as though she would leave it here forever, and until she could come back with the light, the walls would keep it safe enough. 

Not her sword, though. She scooped her swordbelt back to her waist. Her fingers knew the grooves of the metal ring, but the tongue felt so strange, smooth leather sliding through her palm, flecked with scars like her skin. Of course, of course she knew how this worked, it was her own belt, she fed the tongue through the ring and…It slipped from her hand as she tried to loop it over itself and tug secure. The leather wasn’t slippery, except when she tried again and it was too thick to fit through the ring. 

Not right. She knew it wasn’t right, a part of her standing back from herself knowing what was wrong, that it wasn’t just physical and divine strength she’d poured out to get to this point. It didn’t stop her panting as she tried again, desperate to get the belt back where it belonged, the weight of the sword back where it belonged, the sword she couldn’t use right now but was as much a gift as a destrier. 

Zaknafein’s hands covered hers, stilled her. He told her something, quietly, that was either that she had no idea what she was doing, or that she’d done too much already. Either way, she was to stop right now, and let him.

She lifted her elbows, and his hands nipped around her, smoothing the belt, sliding tongue through ring, snugging the leather over her hips, then deftly securing it with tongue wrapping around belt and through itself. He patted her shoulder, and she looked up into something that was clearly a smirk, a comment in his eyes that was clearly _And now one of us is armed, so all is right in the world._

Because that was important. And the next important thing… Iswen closed her eyes, worked it through again, dragging back her focus with effort and fingernails. Destrier here. Armor off. Sword back on. So next was… She reached up, patted Nutmeg’s shoulder, the only part of her she could reach now that her mare had decided the drow held far more potential for treats. 

“This is going to work,” she said, firmly as she could manage. It was mostly going to work because it might be a shit plan but it was pretty well the only option at this point. “Down,” she said. 

Nutmeg blew a long, indignant snort, shaking out her mane, proving that she, too, knew that this was a very bad plan - not, perhaps, as bad as going into the ruins alone in the first place, but at the very least more foolhardy. Or just required more work on her part. “Down,” Iswen repeated, and reached over and tapped just behind her right knee.

She’d always had a gift with horses, since the day her father had decided that she needed to learn to ride before she learned to walk. And she’d perhaps had far too much time on her hands with no one but Nutmeg to talk to over the years, and in general Nutmeg was a very tolerant mare. Nutmeg heaved another long snort, wet and blustery and very clearly to let everyone know that she was doing this because she wanted to humor her human, and dropped to her front knees, then folded her hindlegs under her. She didn’t even roll over to itch at her back, which was really more than Iswen had rightly expected of her.

“Next time,” she muttered as she eyed the distance between her and Nutmeg. “I’m going to make sure you do that right next to me.” Nothing for it but to crawl, but at least it wasn’t far, not more than a reach of her hands and an arch of her hips to shove herself over, close enough to curl her fingers through Nutmeg’s mane and contemplate why her withers felt just as high _now_ as they did when they were both standing. 

It was not the most graceful mount she’d ever done. But rolling her belly over Nutmeg’s back, dragging her leg up and over got her mounted - and if one leg dangled limply off Nutmeg’s far side, well, underneath her Nutmeg was warm and solid, a deep heartbeat drumming somewhere beneath her. Her head spun, and she already dreaded the next part of this, but she was on horseback. She wasn’t safe, but she was home. 

Zaknafein was staring at her again, head cocked and eyes narrowed in that assessing way of his, a warrior judging how much danger they were in and the best place to attack. Or as if he were rapidly reconsidering how sensible he’d thought her. Possibly both. “This will work,” she said, and prayed that she wasn’t lying; she reached down to offer a hand to him, an unmistakable suggestion of what she wanted him to do. 

He said something she was nearly positive was the drow equivalent to “are you fucking shitting me?” if only because she thought she recognized some of the words from things he’d said in the crypt, and she knew he’d been swearing at her then. But however reluctant, he set his hand in hers, even if he really didn’t need the support to gingerly mount behind her. Her back pressed against him, and he was as warm and solid as Nutmeg; he set a hand on her hip too-lightly, and he should really tighten his grip, not because she thought it would feel nice but otherwise he’d end up having to mount again and…

Wandering. Not good. Leg was one thing, head not working was entirely another. Iswen shook herself, tried to remember what part came next. But it was like sands running through her hands; she could squeeze and hold onto her thoughts, but as soon as her grasp loosened, even slightly, everything just slipped away from her again. “Chapterhouse,” she managed. “Need to…”

A normal horse needed more of a cue than that. But Nutmeg wasn’t a normal horse. Beneath her legs, she felt the mare gather her weight, rearranging her hooves, and closed her hands tighter on her mane. Nutmeg lumbered to her feet, and Iswen wasn’t entirely sure how they both stayed on her back, but all that mattered was that suddenly the ground was a lot farther from her than it had been, and that couldn’t be right because it was also moving and she didn’t think Nutmeg was yet. That, and Zaknafein had tightened his grip on her, all that strength at her back wrapped around her, supportive even if he might not have intended it that way. 

Nutmeg stepped forward, and Iswen closed her eyes, because when she did that, the movement made sense: an easy ambling four-beat pace, the warm back under her shifting and rolling. It didn’t matter she couldn’t remember the way back to the rest of the paladins; her hips shifted, rocked into each beat of the gait. Nutmeg blew a snort, or perhaps that was Zaknafein. At her back, his own weight shifted, and then matched her as if he’d been doing this every bit as long as she had. 

And for right now, that was enough. She let her mind go wandering, and just rode into the night.


	12. Chapter 12

Too bright. The surface was so terribly bright that there were no true shadows, not even under the spreading tops of the - his mind faltered for the foreign word for the things that rose up around them in a massive grove, too big and branching and tangled for mushrooms. Whatever they were, they didn’t block the light of the stars. Not for him.

Looking over Doomguide’s shoulder, past the flicking ears of the riding-beast, he could see for…leagues, it must be. In the Underdark, caverns were rarely even half the size of Menzoberranzan’s, and between larger caverns, the passages never ran straight long enough to see far. Here, there was nothing around them, just space that gaped nearly as widely as the sky above.

His skin itched, belly turning over. He could see anything coming, and there was nowhere for an ambush to hide anyways, but all that meant was that there was so much open space he couldn’t watch every direction at once, and why wasn’t she more worried about what was above them? The grove wouldn’t provide protection from a swooping pack of dragazhar. He had to do something, and yet, for all his mind raced, no thought stayed still long enough for him to lay his hand on it, the fear cresting and retreating in waves.

Was it better, coming to the surface this way, too wounded and drained to have the energy to panic? Or had he been right last time, so consumed with finding the path and protecting every fragile halfling - none of whom had the common sense of a cave bat - that he had greeted the light streaming through the cave’s mouth with little more than relief. He’d watched the halflings stream around him for the surface, and as the weight of protecting them had left his shoulders, he’d only felt like himself.

So much like himself he had known that his only path was to turn away and head back into the Underdark, the only place he could belong even if he hated every hour of his life there.

This was different. The only way for him now was forward. He had less choice in it now, but felt less trapped; unsettled by the World Above spreading out around him to be sure, but not as if he were being dragged somewhere he didn’t want to go. If only because he couldn’t imagine Doomguide dragging him anywhere.

The riding-beast stepped down a small slope, jarring him: from that curious thought, from the fear, and almost from the riding-beast. He bumped heavily up and down, pain flaring in places where he hadn’t thought he’d been wounded. The damned thing snorted and shook its head, then looked over its shoulder at him as if it was his fault; the intelligence behind its dark brown eyes was as unnerving as the open sky above. It was warmer than a riding-lizard, he’d give it that. But if Doomguide’s control over it slipped, it was a much longer drop to the ground, and if he fell wrong he wouldn’t have time to rip the sword free before its jaws descended.

Meanwhile Doomguide barely bounced, her hips rocking knowledgeably with each stride. Or luckily: her shoulders and head lolled with each step of the riding-beast, and he tightened his grip on her hips, then dared wrap his arm around her waist. She didn’t notice. It also didn’t seem to help. She still shifted, not quite steady in a way he hoped had to do with the slippery back of the riding-beast, and not her injuries.

She felt fragile. Warm, warmer even than the riding-beast, softer without the hauberk and chainmail shirt, but also fragile. She was not delicate, even now, but pressed against his chest, all he could feel of her told him how very _battered_ she was. Wherever they were going, they needed to get there soon, or he didn’t doubt she’d be the one falling. It might not kill her, but he doubted she’d have the strength to mount again. And that would leave them stranded in the middle of the surface wilderness, easy prey.

Not that they weren’t already.

His mind must have drifted, though he couldn’t say when or for how long, only that they were somewhere else, and time must have passed. He just couldn’t feel how much, couldn’t keep count of heartbeats or breaths or steps of the riding-beast. Above them, even he could tell that the lights above - the _stars_ \- had shifted, but they may as well have done so on their own whims, for all he knew how to read them.

Or, it seemed, the world around them. The riding-beast blew another snort, and its pace picked up again, enough they both bounced, and Doomguide made a little noise of confusion, lifting her head and looking about. She huffed a long breath, and if it was a word it was one the riding-beast understood; it slowed, though its head had come up and didn’t seem terribly pleased by this.

Doomguide reached down and patted it on the neck, then seemed to realize his arm was around her waist: her skin jumped, and she glanced over her shoulder with an arched eyebrow, and that close, he could almost see fatigue jumping under her skin, undercutting the amusement on her mouth. “I say this not to be bold,” he said softly. “But, lady, we need a bed.”

Some jokes didn’t have to be in the same language to be understood: her laugh was a tremble and a huff, and even as she shook her head, she closed her eyes. She shifted, faced forward, and nodded ahead of them, off to the side. The riding-beast stepped forward, following whatever direction she’d given it, and he braced himself for a longer ride, because he could not hope for rest here.

But the riding-beast stepped off the path, and just like finding just the right place on a cavern wall and discovering a side-cave, stone walls reared up in front of them, ones just like a proper House wall, even with an insignia of an upright gauntlet. Doomguide didn’t wear a badge on her hauberk, but he remembered the sight of her holy symbol from the nexus; it had been an arm, yes, but skeletal, and holding scales.

Not her House, then, but the large arched gates stood open, and the riding-beast seemed to know they were to enter, not slowing its steady walk; relief made him want to weep.

It might be a strange House, but what they needed, he could barter his blades for, in the time-honored way of people providing aid as long as there was something in it for them.

The riding-beast passed beneath the arch, into an open space that had the feel of a training yard; bare and open, not stone but hard enough the riding-beast’s hooves rang as it walked into the center of it. Two long, rectangular buildings flanked the yard, graceless and simple: one of stone and the other of what appeared to be brown zurkhwood stalks, both he judged to be two floors high, and he couldn’t imagine either would extend beneath the ground to any depth. And neither with any art to speak of: no carvings, no paintings, no mosaics, not even pleasingly delicate architecture or the glow of colored lights that even drow commoner houses would manage. The one of zurkhwood had a door almost as large as the open gate, and the stone one had a window along one side of the front that gleamed with color, but that was hardly enough.

It didn’t matter. If the House was poor, it would make them desperate enough they’d hire a wandering blade with fewer negotiations.

And it didn’t matter because the riding-beast stopped, snorting and pawing at the hard ground, but Doomguide still swayed as if they were moving. Her weight sagged against his arm, then rocked back - and further. For the first time in three hundred years, his hands were unsteady as he grabbed for something; rough cloth brushed his skin, and then she was tipping too far, over the shoulder of the riding-beast. She hit the ground hard, mercifully shoulder-first, but then didn’t move.

He leapt down. Or he meant to. It was less gallant than he had planned, because whatever his impulses he was bone-tired, mind sluggish except for its craving of true sleep to heal his injuries instead of half-alert Reverie. He slid down the side of the riding-beast, and landed on his feet, he could say that much. The impact jarred his bones, all the way up his aching back and chest, into the skull that hummed with too many sensations, too much brightness and too much pain, even if the brain-bruise had been healed.

He tried to steady himself, but couldn’t even manage that; without her bracing support he staggered like a drunk as he ducked under the riding-beast’s head, and got a huffed snort and indignant few steps backward for his trouble. “You sound like her,” he managed, and the riding-beast blew another gusty snort at him - he couldn’t tell of approval or disapproval.

It wasn’t that clever; he was just tired, and Doomguide was in a heap on the ground. “Priestess,” he managed the honorific on reflex, voice a croak that for once didn’t have a thing to do with the title. He crouched, reached for her shoulder to shake her, then thought better - he did not see broken bones, but moving her still might not be wise while they were on the doorstep of an unknown House. “First,” he said, the rasp of his voice breaking the too-quiet of the training yard, and reached instead for the sword at her waist, the sheath tangled through her legs.

A shout, words in a language he didn’t know but the tone was too-clear. He whirled, tightening his hand on the hilt - but momentum wasn’t enough, and the blade caught with a bare few inches clear of the scabbard; he snarled at it, lifting his eyes to the human female framed in the open front door of the stone building, and snarled at her, too. Taller than he was, too beautiful not to be a noble daughter of the House, broad-shouldered under a narrow white shift cut low over her chest, bright red-gold hair in a simple braid as if she’d been entertaining a lover.

And all he cared about was the unsheathed sword in her hand and the challenge curled around her mouth.

He could take it - could take her sword and kill her. His thoughts didn’t need to be sharp to know the battle to come; he didn’t need to be steady on his feet to fight, to win.

Sanctuary. With effort he dragged himself away from the bone-deep instincts, the play of blows and movements that raced through his mind, and with an effort relaxed his hand from the hilt. They were here for sanctuary, for healing, and while some Houses considered killing one of their priestesses to be an excellent test of skill, most took it poorly, and he didn’t _quite_ have the strength to fight off the entire House right now, without Doomguide to help.

Whatever he’d intended flew from his mind when the noble daughter took another step down to the training yard, her sword coming up in a wary guard that made him regret taking his hand from his - or Doomguide’s, but under the circumstances the sword was more his than hers.

The priestess barked at him, and if he didn’t understand her exact words, the fury in her tone and the sharp gesture was meaning enough: she wanted him to move away, towards the zurkhwood building, away from Doomguide and also the placid riding-beast… and let her approach another priestess, one who was just starting to make little noises of pain and confusion but certainly couldn’t defend herself, with a drawn sword.

Bile rose into his throat, cleaning away the taste of exhaustion and the aches of the too-bright world. “ _No_ ,” he snarled back.

Her skin changed color, flushing brighter pink as her skin heated with anger. It turned her ugly as any drow priestess, all that fury twisting perfect features. Her sword settled in her hand, but it was her feet he watched as she squared herself: good stance, balanced and square. Someone had taken the time to train her well, and she’d absorbed those teachings the way some petty daughters didn’t, who thought that being female meant more in battle than having good footwork. She had reach on him, even aside from actually having a blade in hand. She had every advantage, but she was still only one.

And she wasn’t actually drow, no matter she was a priestess and a noble daughter.

His own stance shifted, settled, hands flexing with one last yearning for that sword on Doomguide’s belt or at least a knife, then he put those trivialities out of his mind. She’d started a curving path, an arc that would take her away from him before coming in tight. She wanted him to retreat; she could always kill him after she’d gotten him away from the prize he guarded. The knowledge flashed through his mind, winged away, left the only course of action in his mind.

She stepped forward, and he didn’t give way to her. Surprise flicked in light eyes, but she was not fool enough not to take the opening; her sword shifted, and he saw in her chest how it would move before the blade tip flicked. He ducked under the cut, rolled forward, and came up inside her guard. This kind of fighting he’d studied in the tavern brawls in the Braeryn, and ironically he felt as drunk now as he had been then. He struck as hard now as he ever had then, low where it rolled through her balance, unarmored as she was.

She grunted, buckling a little under the blow, but before he could follow through, shoved him back with her free arm and leapt back herself - not just the sensible step to bring her sword to bear again, but out of her range as well. The ground seemed to roll under his bare feet as he got his balance, and kept from actually treading on Doomguide - she made another little noise, squirmed, but not nearly rousing fast enough from her fall, if she could at all. His breath huffed out, harder than he would like, but there was a grudging light of respect in the noble daughter’s eyes, a warier set to her sword.

Now, she would kill him first, rather than Doomguide. Zak braced himself for another rush, and the scramble for her sword.

Instead, rushing footsteps caught his ears, and she couldn’t have the hearing of a drow, but the noble daughter’s head still came up, the way Doomguide’s had when she was tracking the wraiths, and she shouted something.

Movement in the corners of his eyes. He flicked a glance, and his heart sank. Two more warriors - one male, one female and with a subtle blurring _wrongness_ to her features - rounding each corner of the long stone building, and they might have as little armor as the noble daughter in front of him, but they too had grabbed their swords.

Sourly, he would have thought that given the number of swords around him, he should have been able to wrestle one of them into his hands. But if they were not drow they were still quick and smooth as they took flanking positions, close enough together to cover each other as well; the position gave him the choice of tangling with them, the noble daughter, or bolting for the open gate. And from how the three smoothly started advancing, they really didn’t care which sword pierced him so long as he moved from Doomguide.

Bad choices and worse. But he’d been in worse places. Probably.

After all, there was still a sword at his feet.

He crouched, eyes flicking between the noble daughter and the pair, and set his hand on the hilt of the sword; one of them shouted, and he sensed the pair at his back running. He dragged at the sword, hissed through his teeth as it caught again.

And Doomguide croaked something. She set her hand on his wrist, rolled, and struggled to her side gingerly. It was enough. Enough that when she said the same word, it carried over the training yard. Or perhaps it was just the sight of her moving, the sound of her voice, that had the two checking their run.

The male called something, and Doomguide snorted as noisily as her mount had, and shaking her head, pushed herself up from the ground. She wavered, and the same instincts that drove him to reach for her sword had his hand under her elbow; she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, and smiled just enough he knew she was grateful as she pushed herself to a knee, then to her feet.

The noble daughter’s eyes narrowed, her sword tip lowering in a way that was no less threatening now than before. She asked something, voice as low as Doomguide’s had been, and in answer Doomguide snorted again.

Some part of the interaction was too-familiar: all of this was too familiar, from the bored riding-beast who cared little for the swords being waved around to the wary circling of the children of the House. “This _is_ your House?” he asked Doomguide. That, happily, made considerably more sense than her expecting them to beg for refuge. “You don’t wear their badge,” he said, since this matter seemed to be far more important than the fact she was greeted by her House with drawn swords.

She leaned against him, her shoulders moving - it took him a moment to realize she was shrugging, and not swaying on her feet. She said something too-light for her nod towards the noble daughter, who had training enough not to tap her sword against the ground but shifted her hand on the hilt as if she dearly wanted to. Then her gaze shifted, looked past his shoulder, and spoke words that were so clearly an order he didn’t need to know what, exactly, she said; he whirled, and found out.

The second female was gesturing with her free hand, and he’d been wrong: _she_ was the priestess, by the green light that twisted around her fingers.

Green. What spells were green? He wracked memories of battles, of spells - barbed and venomous as hand crossbow bolts - hissing past the tip of his ear, burning with cold power when they struck and speared through his skin. Not pure pain, that was red and black. There would just be something that would cause the pain. Poison? Acid?

She flicked her fingertips, and he didn’t even have a chance to brace himself before the green light was all around him. Like falling into the acid pit again, but without the prickling of the acid eating away dead flesh and dead eyes that hadn’t been his, no pain because he was dead before he entered the pit — He was alive. He was alive now, his breath harsh in his ears and Doomguide warm if not quite solid against him. It was only memory that gnawed at his skin, not acid.

Green. Every memory from that time - if they could be called memories, when his mind hadn’t been his, just as little as his body had been - was rimmed in that sickly green of the acid pit. From the acid, eating its way back through even his mind? Or from the spells Malice had hooked into his brain and muscles, ropes that had made him dance for her amusement, under her command?

Compulsions. Mind control. A crooked finger and a spell summoning his worst memories until all he could taste was fear on his tongue.

“ _Spider-kissing bitch_ ,” he spat. “I’ll kill you first you twisted-”

“For _fuck’s sake_ ,” Doomguide growled at his side.

Zaknafein blinked, stared down at her: he’d understood that. He couldn’t say he was entirely surprised by the content, but he’d still understood the words. The shock of it, understanding her voice after so long gesturing and assuming, rolled through him, rocked him back on his heels, mouth clicking shut even before she finished her orders: “You are not killing anyone,” she told him, without taking her eyes from the priestess. “And Nisha is not casting spells without _fucking asking_.”

“I thought _Comrades Across Languages_ was necessary,” the priestess, Nisha, said with a sniff. “And how was I to ask beforehand without it?”

Doomguide bristled. “I don’t _fucking care_ —”

“What is the meaning of this?” a low voice said, and Doomguide whirled to face the male that had stepped from the front door; he’d taken time for a cloak of shield-mushroom orange as well as the bared sword in his hand, but his rank was whispered more as he received the low nod of the noble daughter as though it was merely his due, without even looking at her. His eyes caught Zak’s on the slow scan of the training yard, and a cold line drew down Zak's spine; like always recognized like.

So, not the noble daughter in command, then, but him, the weaponsmaster. Perhaps it was on behalf of his matron, but in this training yard, he was in command.

The weaponsmaster stared a moment more, then shifted his focus to Doomguide, and sheathed his sword. “You’ve returned,” he said, _almost_ blandly. Zak shifted his weight, because he knew that tone. That was a commander who was very displeased to see someone back alive, because it threw careful plans into disarray. Zak's eyes fell, and let them think it was in intimidation or obedience; it was to the sword still at Doomguide’s hip, and he would wager good coin would come free more smoothly now she was upright.

Assuming she didn’t draw it first, anyways. “No shit, Arlen,” she said.

Weaponsmaster Arlen jerked back, flushing as if she’d slapped him full across the face; Zak felt the others, the noble daughter and the priestess and the other male, shift uneasily, as if they were bound up in the strands of tension that hummed between the pair. “Your vulgar tongue is one thing, but this-”

“Oh, fuck off,” she snapped, and Zak swallowed in spite of himself: she wasn’t tugging on the lines of power, she was cutting them. There was defiance, and then there was the defiance that ended in a slow death - who knew that better than him? The idea that she had a deathwish wasn’t entirely new, but he’d thought it confined to jumping into danger alone.

Not that the truth was much better: “You’ve no right to demand anything of me, after you sent me alone to that place.”

Whatever the weaponmaster, cheeks darkening to a deeper red, meant to say, the noble daughter got there first: “You sent her there alone?” she asked, slowly, almost thoughtful, but there was still anger twisting her expression. The coldness of a noble’s anger seeped into the air around her, chilled the training yard until it was the cold stone of the Underdark, and humming around them was bleak knowledge - something Zak had already known, but wasn’t any better for that.

She would have died. Had she not taken the time to free him, had he not found his way through the portal to her side, the wraiths would have killed her, if the Overwraith didn’t.

“A day’s wait,” this time it was the common male - or so Zak had thought, before he’d heard that voice and now could not swear the human male wasn’t a noble son - who spoke. His voice, too, was low, considering, but with the same steel under it. “A half-day, and Valdis or I could have joined her.”

“What was so very urgent six hours or twelve mattered?” the noble daughter - Valdis - said, and this time her sword moved in a subtle circle, almost putting it towards the weaponsmaster.

“Nothing that concerns any under my command,” Arlen said, a little too swiftly to truly have control; Zak could scent it like shed blood, and really, among drow they were much the same thing.

Doomguide laughed, bitter and sharp, almost a cry of pain. “But I’m not under your command,” she said. “You said I wasn’t one of your paladins-” that word, even the spell didn’t translate, but it didn’t matter. “And you still sent me there—” something moved across her face, a wash of realization that only tightened the tension around her eyes, in her voice, some plot she suddenly saw cast around her like a mesh net. “Because they can’t know it exists. I didn’t even find it, but you were willing to have me die rather than tell them -”

“You know not of what you speak,” he said sharply. “Clearly your judgment is compromised, given the company you have now chosen.” Those eyes flicked to his again, and Zak knew the command to come even before the weaponsmaster gathered his shoulders under the authority of his cloak and swept his gaze over the others: “Tormtar,” he said, voice almost melodic with the orders, “Take them into custody. Disarm her. Bind them. Bring them to the chapel: Faithblade Nisha, prepare your spells. We’ll have the truth of it all, one way or another.”

It wasn’t a direct translation, but among the drow, those words meant _spell forced-truth_ or _torture_. Sometimes both, in varying order. From the shock on the priestess’s face, the way her tawny skin paled, it seemed they meant the same here, though perhaps it was rarer or seldom turned against one of their own House.

He sensed the movement, whirled and stepped to protect Doomguide’s back, but it was only the male, sword swaying low, shifting his weight like a common-born soldier caught between bad and worse orders: not edging forward, not daring to protest. He shook his head, not quite looking away, too much of a warrior for that, but not meeting Zak’s eyes either.

Weight on his back. Shoulders pressed to his, and if it was a brief sway from exhaustion and betrayal, he was still glad to have that reminder that Doomguide was still with him, and was guarding his back, too. “It’s wrong,” she said, and her shoulders shifted, squared, and then she straightened, though the ghost of pressure remained along his back. “You know you’ll have the truth from me for the asking. You’ve trusted me before, to guard your backs and speak the truth. Trust me now in this. If it’s a drow I trust-” she took a shuddering breath, “then trust I’ve judged he’s earned it.”

The praise humbled him more than anything that had fallen from Malice’s lips, but if those simple words would have been enough, he’d never know. Certainly both the priestess Nisha and the male seemed still torn with indecision; if they weren’t inclined to follow a bad command, neither did the words of someone who trusted a drow have much weight. Given how trusting drow had turned out for him in the past, Zaknafein really didn’t blame them.

The weaponsmaster snorted, and Zak didn’t have to see his face to hear the scorn twisting his words. “Why, by Torm’s upright hand, _should_ we?”

“Because,” Valdis said, her words as cutting as the steady bite of a blade through flesh, like the blade she swept out at her side in a disgusted gesture, “she has saved my life more than once. Most recently,” her voice rose, sweeping up, not a command but a ringing call to arms, “in Neverwinter, during the plague of the Wailing Death. We both served under Geheris, and he trusted her first and best. Do you foreswear the trust of the Hero of Neverwinter?”

“The Hero of Neverwinter is not here,” Arlen said sardonically. “And considering his actions in that war, he is no true Tormtar.”

“Tormtar, no, but Tyrran he was, and Lawkeeper they named him, and never once did I hear Ser Geheris call for truth to be extracted as if a bad tooth,” Valdis said. “Not even from Lady Aribeth de Tylmarande, after her fall. And,” her voice softened, so that Zak heard the quick hiss of breath from Doomguide, “if our once-sister is no longer Tormtar, she is still a paladin.”

The shudder ran up Doomguide’s back and through his. “Thank you,” she said quietly.

“Don’t thank her for doing what’s right,” the male said, and in his light words were the roughness of a commoner again, and honesty. His eyes slid over Zak’s shoulder, and Zak could almost feel the silent questions humming past him between the children of the House.

And then the air settled, strengthened in stillness. “I call for Torm’s Obedient Rebellion,” Valdis said, and her words didn’t need to echo to utterly fill the space as much as a spell of fire in a too-small cavern. From how the commander recoiled, Zak thought that the spell of translation was doing so too-literally, and she’d announced the name of something that really would explode in the middle of the training yard.

But all that happened was the male warrior stepped forward, a hand loose on the hilt of his sword and a squareness to his shoulders, as he finally found an order he would follow. “I will stand as second,” he said.

“I witness,” the priestess added swiftly, taking a step forward herself. “And judge it True.”

“You cannot,” Weaponsmaster Arlen said, but his eyes darted too-fast between those under his command, and the air stank with his lie. “You are sworn to obey me.”

“No, not with the Obedient Rebellion called and seconded; not with a priestess judging it fair to be called,” the priestess said, and if there was anger in her eyes, it was entirely turned on the weaponsmaster. “It was _made_ for such times as this. It was made to allow us to honor you as our commander and yet refuse an order we know is unethical: we swore to obey, but we did not swear to torture. Even a drow,” she added with disgust.

“You will be _damned_ for this,” Weaponsmaster Arlen swore. “If you stand with her I will cast you out of Torm’s order after her.” A little click, a rasp of metal, and Zak whirled, hissed at the sight of the drawn sword in the weaponsmaster’s hand, and reached for Doomguide’s at her hip.

Valdis got there first. She pivoted, graceful in a shift as if in full battle array, and her sword was between them and the weaponsmaster, pushing his blade away in a parry that was too casual not to have skill as well as strength behind it. “If you contest the Obedient Rebellion,” she said, jaw tight, “go, and bring the matter to the attention of the High Loyan in Red Larch. Learn if, after telling the tale under truth-spell, he thinks us unjustified, and overrules us.”

“As is proper.” Zak jumped; the priestess was at his elbow, too-close, and having moved too softly for his taste.

At least he sensed the male come around to his other side, voice soft and rough again, and in it Zak heard the echo of defiance from the Underdark: all proper words in a biting tone, from someone who did not care if it was heard too clearly: “Or do only _we_ have to follow the laws handed down to us by Torm, and not _you_?”

It wasn’t the battle formation that the weaponsmaster looked over; Zak sensed it in the sweeping gaze that searched all of them for weaknesses. It was what it meant, that even after being roused to defend the House against intruders, they all now circled him and Doomguide with blades pointing outward, defending them. It meant that Weaponsmaster Arlen had truly lost his command, and even if he had been a drow weaponsmaster in truth he wouldn’t have taken his chances against four.

Well. Zaknafein would have. But most drow weaponsmasters didn’t have quite his skill or taste for a challenge.

“If it is the will of the gathered Tormtar,” Weaponsmaster Arlen said, gall and venom in his voice turning the pretty politeness into a curse. “I shall leave at once and seek the counsel of the High Loyan.” He stared at the cluster of swords, and there was naked anger on his face. “And I shall not forget what was done here.” He turned on his heel, the orange cloak swirling around him, and vanished back into the long building of the House.

The door slammed behind him, and Zak let out the breath he hadn’t been quite sure he’d been holding. It echoed more than it should have. Apparently everyone had let out the same long, terrified breath. Doomguide closed her eyes, and what little strength had gathered into her shoulders from anger seeped out, left them slumped again. “Well, fuck,” she said, resigned.

“Whatever the commander says of it, I like your vulgar tongue,” Valdis said, sheathing her sword. “And bright Torm, but I’m glad to see you.”

“Though you had damn well better not be wrong about the drow,” Nisha muttered.

The laugh quivered through him, until his chest ached and he didn’t have the strength to stand _and_ laugh, and since he needed to stay on his feet the laugh came out instead as a huffed bark. “Fair, priestess,” Zak said again, and he’d even have inclined his head, but he thought even moving that much would make the ground rise up and hit his face.

Zak could almost feel her eyes on him, and then she said slowly, “The spell won’t last much longer, and it would be cruel to demand more of you tonight. Unless we need to.”

Cryptic remark or not, Doomguide seemed to have no trouble interpreting it. “No,” she said, voice no better than his now she didn’t have curses flying out of it, “No, all the wraiths are dead. More dead,” she corrected. “Nothing should attack us tonight.”

Valdis nodded. “Then you - both -” she amended, looking between them, almost as if she were as surprised as Zak was to hear the word come out of her mouth - “need rest more than healing. There’s a bed waiting for you,” she said to Doomguide. Eyes sliding back to Zak, she hesitated, and he waited to hear her explanation for why they were putting him in one of their cells.

Not that he didn’t understand; he just wanted to hear the words _because you’re drow_ come out of her mouth.

“Grain room,” Doomguide said.

Was the spell of translation wearing off already? A glance at Nisha showed that she was just as confused by the words, but the male warrior was nodding. “Stables, not the main chapterhouse. One door, locked from the outside,” he said. “Big enough, pull the grain bags flat they’re softer than the stone. Nothing that could be used as a weapon.”

Zak saw the shape of the plan just as well as they did and had to nod. If they wanted to secure someone without putting them in chains that would be an insult under the circumstances, it would serve.

He didn’t bother warning them that it wouldn’t take him much longer to gain a weapon than if they locked him in the armory; there was little point in helping one’s enemies. He was grateful they’d defended him, but he wasn’t such a fool to trust them; he’d been grateful to Jarlaxle and hadn’t trusted him for a day in all the time he’d known him. And that had been the longest relationship of his life, one that had been as close to a _friendship_ as a drow could have.

The priestess seemed worried about an absurd point: “No windows, either,” she said. “It’ll be dark.”

The laugh barked out of him before he could help himself. “Finally, and thank whichever goddess you follow.”

Nisha arched her eyebrows, her skeptical gaze not for him but for Doomguide, who shrugged as if to parry questions on the matter. “Bran,” Doomguide asked instead, and the male warrior looked over, “could you - Nutmeg?”

“Easy enough, without gear,” Bran said, seeming to understand that cryptic remark as well. “Where in Chauntea’s green grass did you leave your saddle this time?” he said lightly, teasing.

“Morning,” Valdis repeated with the firmness of a First Daughter taking command, “is soon enough.”

And, like a good House falling in line, that seemed to settle it. Bran didn’t quite lay a hand on his elbow, but the warmth ghosting over Zak's skin made it very clear he was to follow as the warrior escorted him into the long zurkhwood building. Placid footfalls sounded behind him, and he looked over his shoulder to watch the riding-beast follow along in their wake.

The interested prick of her ears was the last thing he coherently remembered. From there only fragments and impressions struck him as he passed into the building proper: a scent of cleaned leather and dried moss and sweat, whispering noises of riding-beasts as they passed stalls. Bran opened a door, but how far they’d walked or where it was in the building, he couldn’t say. The scent of dried moss was stronger, joined by the scent of grain even he recognized. His palm scraped against the doorframe, and if he didn’t know how he’d staggered he did know that what was under his hand was too rough to be zurkhwood.

Bran was saying something to him, and the tone, the pattern of syllables, sounded as though he was repeating the same thing over and over, but he couldn’t be - the translation spell failing? Something soft was beneath his cheek - was he laying down, then? - and it smelled stronger of sweat and something else he couldn’t name but wasn’t unpleasant.

He didn’t hear the door close. He did notice when the room cut to full black, almost dark as the Underdark, and just as quiet with the little sounds of the stable around him.

The world twisted, and he sank into it. And knew nothing else.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos give me life! Don't know what to comment? "Bonus Kudos!" is totally a valid comment I would be thrilled to get.


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